Rebecca-Anne Withey: Review of the National Theatre Collection – available to view online and fully captioned!

The National Theatre Collection provides online access to 30 world class productions for students to enjoy from the comfort of their own home or in a classroom setting. It’s available worldwide to libraries, schools and universities and can now be accessed by UK state schools for free.

The titles available to view include works of Shakespeare, well known novels, Greek tragedies as well as adaptations created with younger audiences and primary schools in mind.

The National Theatre kindly granted me temporary access to their collection and I was delighted to see that every single play or production I viewed online was captioned.

The captions, in traditional clear white font, were comfortable to read and delivered at perfect speed with additional text offered to describe certain sounds or music that was playing.

I was able to watch a production of Peter Pan, devised especially for primary schools. I found the experience of viewing a live show in the form of a film to be a very enjoyable one.

The film had been shot and edited in such a way that you gained a sense of intimacy that you would not have felt even if you were attending the show live.

The use of close ups and mid shots, provided me with the opportunity to lip read each character if I so desired and thus match up the lip patterns and facial expressions perfectly with the captions provided.

The directing and editing of the films was seamless and dynamic, with a real cinematic quality. If you’ve ever fidgeted through a real life play, the option to view one online is perhaps a more suitable alternative, with the option to pause and resume play where necessary.

Browsing through the vast range of materials on offer online, it is inspiring to see a whole world of theatre open up to students who may have never even been to a live show. The collection also, of course, fills a huge gap for those who have missed out on seeing live productions over the last 15 months during the pandemic.

Alice King-Farlow, Director of Learning at the National Theatre said,

“Given the unprecedented challenges we are all currently facing across the globe, we want to ensure that pupils, teachers and academic institutions are supported during this time and can continue to have access to a range of learning resources during the school closure period.

The National Theatre Collection is an invaluable resource and with thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing, we are able to open up access to pupils and teachers across the UK and ensure young people will be able to continue to explore world-class productions and all aspects of theatre-making.”

I would definitely recommend schools and colleges take up this fantastic offer of free access to such a wide range of high quality productions. The use of English captions takes the initiative one step further to being fully inclusive to deaf and hard of hearing pupils, and I am very pleased to see this.

While I was studying for my Performing Arts A Level and for my Dance degree, it was very rare to find video resources with accurate English captions, so this is something that I, personally, would have loved to utilise when I was studying.

As The National Collection does not currently have any BSL led films or BSL access provided, I would like to see the inclusion of and development of these in future to fully include deaf or hard of hearing students who are sign language users.

To find out more about The National Theatre see https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/

Teachers can sign up now to National Theatre Collection on Bloomsbury’s Drama Online Platform via www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/ntcollection