UK theatres still offer streaming services, which make it possible to watch theatre performances in Covid-19 times. Some of these are still 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.

Here are some of the free online productions:

• if you are interested in musicals, here is Dave Malloy’s Ghost Quartet (info on Ghost Quartet on Wikipedia).
• Cheek by Jowl’s version of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale (highly recommended!) is still 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 play 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 Bristol Old Vic show some of their productions on their Bristol Old Vic At Home Channel.
• The Southwark Playhouse have released some of their productions: Jesse Briton’s Bound; the rock musical Wasted, which gives an account of the struggles, heartbreaks and triumphs of the three Brontë sisters Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and their brother Branwell; Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night; Philip Ridley’s The Beast will Rise, a series of fourteen online monologues by Philip Ridley, released weekly – all world premieres.
• 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 as well as the purpose of writing, and how (and if) to engage in activism. 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. It toured to schools across England before touring to New York's Park Avenue Armory, where the production was filmed.
• 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 atre still online: e.g. Händel, Acis and Galatea and Wagner, The Flying Dutchman.
• likewise, the Bayerische Staatsoper has a free live stream service with varying programmes.

If you are interested in the arts in general, you might find something to your taste

• at the Southbank Centre;
• at the Barbican’s Read, Watch & Listen website.

Nick Hern Books have just published a new blog post about their Most-Performed Plays of 2019. Amanda Whittington’s play The Thrill of Love made the Top 10 and, because they 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