Royal Shakespeare Company's Technologically Innovative The Tempest now in US Cinemas

	The Tempest. Photo: Courtesy of Trafalgar Releasing

Royal Shakespeare Company's acclaimed production of Shakespeare's The Tempest is being seen in cinemas across America this month. The production, which opened to rave reviews at the RSC's home in Stratford-upon-Avon, was filmed for "Live from Stratford-upon-Avon," the RSC program that screens the world's greatest classical theatre company from Shakespeare's home town around the world through a continued partnership with Trafalgar Releasing.

Directed by Gregory Doran, RSC's artistic director, and starring Simon Russell Beale as Prospero, the production features production design by Stephen Brimson Lewis, video by Finn Ross, lighting by Simon Spencer, and sound by Jeremy Dunn and Andrew Franks. It also features digital character creation by The Imaginarium Studios. The last credit is the key to the production's most singular quality: It is the first live motion-capture performance appearing in a major classical stage production.

In the production, the actor Mark Quartley, as Ariel, is fitted out with a motion-capture suit that turns him into a constantly changing avatar. In a promotional video for the production Tawny Schlieski, director research at Intel, says, "We take real-time information from a motion-capture suit, map that onto a complex digital avatar, and then project that avatar out through 27 projectors." As a result, says Ben Lumsden, of Imaginarium, "We have unlimited versions of Ariel."

Sarah Ellis, head of digital development at RSC, says that The Tempest, which opened in 2016, was part of a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. "There is a masque scene in the play, and, in Shakespeare's day, these were huge spectacles of innovation. Gregory Doran wondered what a 21st-century masque would look like. I took it from there."

Ellis went to the Internet and found on YouTube a presentation made by Intel at the 2014 Consumer Electronics show, which featured an extraordinary use of projection technology. She adds, "We reached out to them and, from that moment, we had a two-and-a-half-year partnership on The Tempest.

The effort, she notes was "huge. We went from a two-minute YouTube video clip to a three-hour Shakespeare play with 40' projection surfaces. We brought together people from many industries to tell this story. It has taken great skill and many questions were asked along the way. We weren't sure it could happen. But technology moves so quickly: Now [Quartley] is able to wear a costume with 17 sensors hidden in it. He can walk around the whole volume of the stage. It's a gyroscopic suite; the sensors send signals on a Wi-Fi system that goes into the technology pipeline. As Mark performs onstage, his avatar appears onstage as well."

Ellis adds, "As we understood the technology more, we experimented with it, pushing it in more interesting ways. We had a clear design brief to make the technology work with our current systems. We were very proud of the fact that we created some code for the systems to talk to each other. And in tech rehearsals, Gregory Doran could make changes to Ariel in situ. Rendering and cutting take a long time; having a live avatar means that you can change it live. That was very important to us."

You can read more about The Tempest in the April issue of Lighting&Sound America. To find out more about where to see the film version, go the URL listed below.