UK theatres still offer streaming services, which make it possible to watch theatre performances in Covid-19 times. Some of these are free; for others you have to pay (for obvious reasons). For details, and an overview, check the regularly updated websites of WhatsOnStage and Get your theatre fix. Recent additions are in this colour.

Here are some of the free online productions:

• Some of the productions of Shakespeare’s Globe are online on youtube (at the moment: Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Richard II, an all women of colour production).
• Cheek by Jowl’s version of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale (highly recommended!) is available on youtube.
• Leicester’s Curve Theatre will show Joe Orton’s „lewd, bloody and brilliant“ farce What the Butler Saw.
• The award-winning and internationally-acclaimed physical theatre company Gecko Theatre is streaming their 30 minute show The Time of Your Life, in which a the man embarks on a journey through rooms representing different milestones in his life.
• Synergy Theatre Project and Unicorn Theatre have put Evan Placey’s Girls Like That online, a play that follows a group of schoolgirls reacting as one of their peers has naked photos of themselves leaked online.
• A musical based on Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, filmed live at The Southbank Centre, is now available on youtube.
• The RSC has two online productions created by playwright Tim Crouch: Cinna (The Poet) is a drama written and directed by Tim Crouch and starring Jude Owusu, inspired by the RSC's 2012 production of Julius Caesar. Cinna is a minor character in Julius Caesar, who is killed by the mob simply for having the same name as one of the conspirators. This powerful one-man play explores Cinna's experience of the political unrest going on around him. And there is First Encounters With Shakespeare: King Lear: In the summer of 2012, a company of nine actors and director Tim Crouch came together to create a production of King Lear specifically for young audiences.
• There is a – slightly old-fashioned – 1979 television performance of Macbeth based on the original RSC stage production of 1976, directed by Trevor Nunn, with Ian McKellen as Macbeth and Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth.

If you are interested in opera

• Some of the Royal Opera Covent Garden productions are still online: e.g. Händel, Acis and Galatea, Mozart, Die Zauberflöte, Verdi, La Traviata, Wagner, The Flying Dutchman and Johann Strauß, Die Fledermaus (a 1977 production with Tiri de Kanawa).
• Likewise, the Bayerische Staatsoper, Opernhaus Zürich, Opéra de Paris and other opera houses around the world have free live stream services with varying programmes.
• The European Commission-supported OperaVision supplies free top-tier performances filmed at the highest quality level.

In 2020, Nick Hern Books published a blog post about their Most-Performed Plays of 2019. Amanda Whittington’s play The Thrill of Love made the Top 10 and, because Nick Hern liked our pictures so much, they featured a photo from the AnglistenTheater production! Take a look at the blog post here.

We always welcome new members, whether they would like to be on stage as actresses and actors, or rather join our team of creatives or the backstage and front of house crew.     
 

If you would like to know more about this, do mail us at   anglistentheater@philhist.uni-augsburg.de