There’s no need for a pause on video – better to explore its theatrical potential

The West End is awash with video. Katie Mitchell, Ivo van Hove, Jamie Lloyd: they’re all at it, fusing live performance with filmed footage. The most exciting use of video I’ve seen recently, however, was not in London but in Berlin, where the Maxim Gorki Theatre presented Demons, a joint project by directors Sebastian Nübling (best known to UK audiences for Three Kingdoms) and Boris Nikitin, in which a group of actors were let loose around the city streets for three hours, with a camera team tracking their every move. The resulting footage was beamed back to the theatre, where audiences watched on a screen.

The actors, all clad in matching black suits and baseball caps, roamed through the oddly empty streets around the Gorki, located in Berlin’s museum district, before winding up at Potsdamer Platz. Shot in black and white, colour was only gradually allowed to enter the frame – a splash of red here, a flare of yellow there. The actors ventured down alleys and into underground car parks. They went down into Berlin’s U-Bahn stations – and even took a train at one point, the camera following them the whole time.

The camera work was, at times, audacious. The subway station sequence had the feel of a live-action Inception, with the actors seemingly clambering up the walls and between the station’s pillars, though they were actually lying on the ground. We were also subjected to long passages of the actors trudging around the city. There was a lot of footage of people walking. The experience of watching it shifted continuously back and forth between the hypnotic and the alienating (though sometimes it was both simultaneously).

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