Stage versus Film? Is this an appropriate comparison? In

In her post titled “Theatre is life, Film is Art, and TV is Furniture”, Lauren Macready states that the reason she loves stage is because it is more rewarding for both the actors and the audience. The live element of stage means the story is unfolding in real time so that there is the ability for spontaneity and for each performance to have a uniqueness about it.

When asking the question of stage versus screen, Lauren refers to screen as being film. However, I would argue that this might not be the best medium to compare the ‘liveness’ of stage with. It is true, that unless the viewer decides to randomly choose which chapter order they watch their DVD in, there probably won’t be much interaction between the viewer and the text. And even this wouldn’t duplicate the same uniqueness or one-off experience that comes from stage as the order of chapter could be replicated by any amount of people. This would mean that it does not have the feeling of immediacy or liveness as if this is a once off moment that only the particular people in the immediate vicinity can experience.

You could argue that the live element of film is the experience that the viewer has while watching it. The actual film text doesn’t change, but every viewers experience will be different. People will miss certain words, they will not get certain allusions or inferences or they miss the importance of them, the viewer’s emotions will alter how they react to story lines, the location of where they view it and the medium will affect the experience (watching a film on your iphone is different from watching it in the cinema) and the people who they view it with. All these things inform the viewer’s experience.

I think the idea of spontaneity which Lauren mentions, refers to the interactivity of the audience and the cast members and the idea that the story of theatre unfurls in the moment. Rather than comparing this to film, if you wanted to make a comparison between stage and an electronic medium that allows interactivity and liveness, a possibility could be video games.

In video games, the audience has a direct influence on the outcome of the story (the audience is responsible for whether Mario lives or dies and how his journey plays out). Like stage, video games have a skeleton for which the storyline hangs, however each performance is unique. Like stage, there is a uniquenss in video games in that a story will never be exactly the same. It is a live, once-off performance.