Lyn Gardner asks if traditional theatre is being usurped by ‘new-fangled tech’.
I'm seriously beginning to wonder whether the Edinburgh international festival has yet to experience that new-fangled technology called the electric light, or whether they might still be writing on parchment using quill pens. While director Jonathan Mills has programmed his 2013 festival with a technological theme, supposedly exploring "the way technology seizes and shifts our perceptions of the world, translated and made manifest by artistic visionaries," most of the theatre shows seem oddly old-fashioned.
His theatremakers may be employing digital technology that creates breath-taking effects, but most of the shows are just not using the technology in particularly interesting ways. As Susannah Clapp observed in her roundup yesterday of three EIF shows: "Subtle artists begin to behave like six-year-olds in front of a PlayStation." In the case of Metamorphosis and Histoire d'Amour, they look like six-year-olds with very big budgets indeed.
I'm seriously beginning to wonder whether the Edinburgh international festival has yet to experience that new-fangled technology called the electric light, or whether they might still be writing on parchment using quill pens. While director Jonathan Mills has programmed his 2013 festival with a technological theme, supposedly exploring "the way technology seizes and shifts our perceptions of the world, translated and made manifest by artistic visionaries," most of the theatre shows seem oddly old-fashioned.
His theatremakers may be employing digital technology that creates breath-taking effects, but most of the shows are just not using the technology in particularly interesting ways. As Susannah Clapp observed in her roundup yesterday of three EIF shows: "Subtle artists begin to behave like six-year-olds in front of a PlayStation." In the case of Metamorphosis and Histoire d'Amour, they look like six-year-olds with very big budgets indeed.