Romeo & Juliet, Sky Arts

On 16 March 2020, the National Theatre shuts its doors due to the pandemic. For 11 years, the NT has successfully broadcast its productions to cinemas worldwide. With theatres and cinemas suddenly shut, the thrill and model of sharing live events had been taken away, but left in its place was an opportunity of time and space to make theatre come alive again in a new way.

Rufus Norris (the National Theatre’s director and joint chief executive) called me in early April, fearing the closure might last longer than anticipated. His provocation– what if we turned the Lyttelton Theatre into a film studio? Rufus and I have long shared a passion for the intersection of film and theatre – along with Dixie Linder of Cuba Pictures when we all made the feature film, London Road.

One of the NT’s planned summer productions was Romeo & Juliet, directed by Simon Godwin with Josh O’Connor and Jessie Buckley. With such a beloved title and the actors attached, it presented a clear opportunity for this idea of theatre on film in reinvented form.

There was naturally fear and hesitation. Romeo & Juliet already boasts several iconic screen versions and the risk was to make a hybrid of film and theatre that succeeded at neither. In raising the finance, there was interest but also scepticism in the concept and how it would differ from previous filmed performance, though we fortunately found adventurous partners in Sky Arts, PBS and No Guarantees.

We envisaged a film that was cinematic in form, but undeniably a celebration of the location and environment of the theatre. The Lyttelton Theatre, one of the NT’s three auditoria, houses a wide proscenium stage, cinematic in aspect. It also houses two additional spaces of nearly identical size behind and beside it, part of the infrastructure that allows the NT to play in repertory.

In film, if the story is set in Verona, it’s shot in Verona, or a version of it. In the theatre, the actors and creative team ask the audience to suspend their disbelief and go on a journey of collective imagination. Thus, the basic concept – a group of actors arrives to rehearse and as the story lifts off, so too do our imaginations and the world on screen becomes more ‘real.’

Though, as with puppetry, the strings are always present and there was a conscious acknowledgment of the theatre’s mechanics throughout. Uncle Vanya on 42^nd Street and Stop Making Sense were two references that hero an empty space that evolves as we invest emotionally in the storytelling.

Emily Burns (who adapted the play for screen) distilled the text to a swift 90 minutes and forged a system of levels that articulated the escalation we were imagining – level 0 representing the more intimate ‘rehearsal room’ run and level 2 being the more fully realised world the characters inhabit.

The challenge for every department was to find this equivalent mapping in lighting, sound, music and design. Soutra Gilmour, the original theatre designer, had to pivot to the demands of production designing for camera whilst maintaining a harmony across the imagined locations and stage environment. 

NT Live employs a multicamera approach, a collaboration between broadcast professionals and in-house theatre staff to film a stage production as dynamically and sympathetically as possible.

The opportunity with Romeo & Juliet was to create something specifically made for screen, with the time and control to shoot single camera. Whilst we sought to bring in the best film expertise where needed, wherever we could use a member of the theatre staff, we did – a central aim was to keep as many staff and theatre freelancers creating work.

Every department, apart from the camera team, drew from the NT’s workshops and technical teams. We employed a great film gaffer (Sam Alberg) but the pre-requisite was to work with the in-house lighting team. This became one of the most collaborative aspects, the resources of the NT allowing us to light beyond our budget and engendering a knowledge exchange between two worlds that do not often meet.

We rehearsed for four weeks immediately followed by a 17-day shoot. It was important to me that the actors and Simon had a theatrical rehearsal process (theatre rehearsals typically last five to six weeks) which would, in turn, allow us to shoot more efficiently.

We ensured the first AD (Chris Stoaling) and DoP (Tim Sidell) were part of the creative conversation from the outset and in rehearsals every day and our editor (Nick Emerson) was assembling on site allowing for a regular exchange between the edit and shooting process as we only had four weeks post-shoot to reach picture lock.

We filmed in December as cases rapidly increased and London went into another lockdown. With testing, careful guidelines, the strict discipline of all cast and crew and no doubt a stroke of good luck, we managed to complete on schedule without any delays – it felt like something of a miracle to wrap on 22 December.

There was a palpable sense of purpose, solidarity and love amongst the company and crew. To inhabit these darkened spaces and breathe life back into the theatre but through the medium and permanence of film felt an immense privilege.