New breed of theatre-makers take trailers centre stage

Marketing, the internet and social media have led theatre companies towards filmed trailers but the results have been decidedly mixed, writes PETER CRAWLEY

‘SORRY ABOUT my computer,” says Grace Dyas, as her MacBook Pro stalls again. “Its been making theatre all day.”

Dyas, one-third of the indefatigable Dublin company THEATREclub, is scouring YouTube for a video she made last year to publicise her first play, Rough. While the clip eludes her, and then, once found, refuses to play, it seems for a moment that the Information Age will never be on friendly terms with the theatre. But then the video begins to play and a much stronger case emerges for the contrary.

Dyas supplies some director’s commentary as a dance track swells behind the two-minute clip, filmed guerrilla-style outside a nightclub. “These are all the people that we wanted to see the show,” she says of the late-night revellers surrounding the actor Roxanna Nic Liam, who implores the camera, “Call somebody and ask for help.” Even as her words grow louder, more distressed, no one bats an eyelid and the effect is both unsettling and mesmerising. “I really thought that people would look at her,” said Dyas.

"The fact that they didn't made it so successful. And she was screaming, like." That, more or less, is a good synopsis of Roughtoo, which offered a stylish picture of empty encounters on the dancefloor and girls drowning in disconnection. Dyas, who debuted the clip on Facebook and cannily tagged the tastemakers of the Dublin nightlife scene to promote interest, refers to her clips as "virals". But it was a remarkably effective trailer in a theatre that often approaches the medium as awkwardly as an uncle taking to the dance floor.

Strange things happen when you bring a video camera into a theatre. Suddenly everything looks painfully exposed. The lights are too bright. The make-up is too heavy. The space seems dispiritingly bare. The performers are over-animated. It’s easy to see why. Conventions that work fine for the stalls look ham-fisted in close-up and wide shots give theatre the remoteness of an aerial photograph. The eye will always makes allowances and adjustments that a lens never will.

The forces of marketing, the internet and their apotheosis on social media have led theatre companies towards filmed trailers in recent years, though.

The results have been decidedly mixed. The Abbey began, quite adventurously, in 2007, with a teaser for its production of The Playboy of the Western Worldin which actors addressed the camera directly as though we were the mysterious new Playboy. Lately, though, its promos have resembled dispatches from the dress rehearsal: an initial speech in close-up, a briskly edited montage of action over the soundtrack, the performance details. The Abbey is hardly alone in the approach, torn between the necessity of properly representing the production and not capitulating too much to a distorting grammar of film, with little to show except actors in costume making big gestures. Too often the theatre trailer looks like the work of a frustrated film-maker.

Oddly, that's what gives a new trailer, from Dublin Fringe favourites The Company, its appeal. A promo for its upcoming Absolut Fringe show, As You Are Now So Once Were We, is somewhere between pastiche – a trailer about trailers – and a very witty self-critique. Obeying the precise rhythmic build, dizzying jump cuts and inane dialogue blip of so many thriller trailers, it has arch attention but no budget, managing to be both comic and actually quite thrilling.

"Ridiculous!" its director José Miguel Jimenez says when we finish watching it, but for all its spoofery, it is cleverly informed by the show it represents. The only clue that the production is inspired by James Joyce comes when two characters are glimpsed slipping copies of Ulyssesinto their bags, and it remains there like a locked secret. "Working with Ulysseswe found all these languages and concepts and structures. But the basic story is about nothing. It's 'the dailiest day possible'." says Jimenez. "So how can we make that attractive? How can we promote that?" The answer was a promo full of generic soundtrack music and furious glances, signifying nothing, but generating infectious buzz.

Both THEATREclub and The Company are a new breed of theatre-maker who use computers, video and editing as an integral part of their dramaturgy – which is how they can conceive of trailers as complementary art works to their productions and why a MacBook Pro can get tired from making theatre all day.

They agree, with some surprise, that the trailers have started to inform their finished works, and not the other way around. "When you make a show," says company member Brian Bennett, "you gather so much stuff that you have to cut it down to what you actually need." As they whittled down As You Are Now So Once Were We, Jimenez realised that they were using the progression of the trailer as a guide.

The universal law of the cinema is that the finished product is never as good as the trailer. The stage, mercifully, tends to obey the reverse. But as a new generation of theatre-makers grow more savvy about the moving image, that day could be coming to a theatre near you.

The Company's As You Are Now So Once Were Weruns at Project Arts Centre from September 9th-15th. THEATREclub's three plays, Heroin, Maximimum Joyand Shane Byrne Has Left His Sleeping Bag in the Car Againrun in Smock Alley from September 10th-17th. As part of the Absolut Fringe.www.fringefest.com

Trailer trashed

A teasing pastiche from The Company's As You Are Now So Once Were Wehttp://url.ie/7bqq

Viral exposure from THEATREclub's Roughhttp://url.ie/7bu5

Trailer by numbers with the Abbey's The Plough and the Starshttp://url.ie/7bu6

A premature look, or a stab in the dark, at Performance Corporation's Slattery's Sago Sagahttp://url.ie/7bu7

More successful performance footage from Corn Exchange's Freefallhttp://url.ie/7bua

Opaque mystery from Gary Duggan and Gavin Logue's Neuropolishttp://url.ie/7bub