Orchestral Theatre and the Concert as a Performance Laboratory

Abstract

In the last decade the National Theatre has presented two productions featuring an onstage orchestra (the Southbank Sinfonia) that has been choreographed and made into a key part of the spectacle: Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, by Tom Stoppard with a musical score by André Previn, performed in 2009 and 2010, and Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, performed in 2016 and 2018. Contemporaneously, a vanguard of British orchestras has begun to explore how concerts can be presented in ways that are more theatrically sophisticated than the standard concert format. This article investigates ‘orchestral theatre’ as an aesthetic proposition by examining the collaborations between the Southbank Sinfonia and the National Theatre, and their legacy in a series of experimental concerts staged by the Southbank Sinfonia entitled #ConcertLab, which began in 2017. The article aims to identify the artistic and cultural significance of the aforementioned collaborations and #ConcertLab so as to better understand contemporary efforts to present orchestras (and, more broadly, classical music) in a theatrically innovative manner.