?

Little shop of horrors.

This afternoon we went to see the new production of Little Shop of Horrors. A truly engaging, colourful performance, with fantastic production design and costuming, it was very interesting to see how stories translate onto the stage, versus on the screen.

What really stood out was the incredible difference in approaches to performance between stage and screen.

Actors on screen are able to be far more subtle when attempting to convey / portray a certain mood, as audience emotion may be manipulated further to correspond with a particular scene through the use of additional emotional cues created by various cinematic techniques; lighting,music, camera angles, editing etc. However, in theatre, the emotional state of the characters must be made perfectly clear to the audience, hence the tendency towards ‘theatrical’ performance, wherein actors emotions are made plain, dramatised to an extent that it would impossible to misconstrue.

This type of performance has become inherently connected with theatre, and has a long-standing historical connection with the medium, traditionally used as a caricature of society.