Eryn Jean Norvill was ready for her close-up, pursued not by a bear but by a phalanx of film cameras in STC Artistic Director Kip Williams’ five-star reimagining of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s bonfire of vanity horror novel-turned-stage play. So successful was this fusion of art forms that Williams deployed the tactic again with last year’s Ewen Leslie and Matthew Backer-led Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Playing with cameras, including the possibility of using smaller puppets that can then be filmed live and projected on a large screen, Watts and co realised they could fold epic moments into Lé Nør that would otherwise be very difficult to visualise without a much larger budget. But not at the expense of losing the intimate nature of live theatre. ‘I see the camera in the same way I view puppets,’ Watts says. ‘They’re a great tool for connecting to the audience. To pretend that this thing is alive.’
