Review 2013: Not The Doctor: Streaming Theatre.

Theatre Another by-product of our getting unlimited broadband in the house has been a less tentative approach to see what exactly is available to watch online, and not just from official channels like thespace.org One of the surprises is the mass of amateur and semi-professional theatre productions available to stream through various video services, as companies that might otherwise have filmed their work then put the tape on a shelf have uploaded such things online for posterity.  Search Vimeo for both spellings of "theatre" or "theater" and sorting by duration reveals some not safe for work material from the Center for Sex and Culture in California (you have been warned) but also a California Institute of the Arts production of Measure for Measure, or the first two rare treats embedded below, Thomas Middleton's A Mad World My Masters and John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan in excellent productions from the Department of Theatre, Film and Television in York.  YouTube's search is less hospitable but its catalogue much larger.  Fancy some Sophocles?  Here's Jesse Eisenberg in a rehearsed reading of Philoctetes at the now defunct Philoctetes Center in New York. Or Boston University which seems to be working their way around Early Modern Drama - Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair's below too, filmed albeit as so many of these productions are, from a single camera at the back.  The best strategy is just to dive in - there are plenty of professional productions too.

A Mad World My Masters from TFTV_York on Vimeo.

The Dutch Courtesan dir Michael Cordner from TFTV_York on Vimeo.





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