Has anyone else been to one of these live cinema screenings of the National Theatre plays? We totally failed to get tickets to see the Danny Boyle/Benedict Cumberbatch/Jonny Lee Miller production of Frankenstein in the whole ten minutes they were on sale, so we jumped at the chance to go to see it at a cinema instead, and just barely managed to get tickets for that before all the London venues sold out.
Anyway, the first of the two Frankenstein live screenings was last night and it was FANTASTIC! For £15, I am absolutely convinced we got the better show than the people at the Olivier Theatre - they had multiple cameras, including a ceiling mounted one, and the camerawork and editing and sound was all superb - it was more like watching a really good film than one of those staid, horrible plays-on-tv we had to sit through in high school English class. We could see way, way more emotion and detail than even the people in the front row... Plus our cinema let us take booze in with us, how civilised.
We enjoyed it so much that we're talking about buying the inevitable dvd for this when it comes out, and signed up to the newsletter for next season's plays.
I'm fairly certain next Thursday's screening of Frankenstein (with the opposite casting - Cumberbatch as the doctor and Miller as the creature) is sold out in London but there are cinemas showing it all over the country and the world, too, so it's worth looking on
the NT Live site to see if there are tickets left by you. I highly highly recommend going if there are!
Has anyone else been to any of these? I think they've only been doing it for a season or two now, but it's seriously slick and great value for money!