Hibrow Productions plans to launch an Internet TV channel for the arts later this year, and has teamed up with Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre to broadcast live Fringe theatre into cinemas nationwide. Chris Sharratt finds out more.

Doing anything on August 23 at 7pm? Fancy seeing some new theatre at the Edinburgh Fringe? The Scottish capital a bit too far for you? No problem, just check out your local Picturehouse cinema instead.

Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre has teamed up with fledgling Internet TV company Hibrow Productions for the first broadcast of its kind from the Fringe. Following in the steps of the National Theatre’s NT Live season and The Met: Live, Traverse Live! presents in one sitting five half-hour plays from the theatre’s Impossible Things Before Breakfast series. The plays will be performed script-in-hand and showcase brand new work.

“It’s about letting an audience into the process we go through in terms of developing a play,” explains Traverse director Dominic Hill. “A script-in-hand play puts the emphasis on the words and the actor, and the broadcast will get the work of major playwrights, although perhaps not particularly known playwrights, to a broader audience.”

“The digital environment offers creative opportunities to do things with live performance that go beyond the experience of watching a rock concert being streamed.”

The list of writers involved is impressive: Enda Walsh, David Eldridge, Simon Stephens, Marina Carr and Linda McLean, each of which has been teamed up with a director. Equally impressive is the ambitious approach to filming the plays and the commitment to producing a cinematic experience, rather than an approximation of watching the plays in the theatre.

“The idea of very intimate, studio theatre going to the big screen was very appealing to me,” says Don Boyd of Hibrow. “We’ve been trying to devise ways to make it very cinematic, in the way that the more intimate Tarantino moments are, or the more cerebral stuff you might expect from a Bergman movie.”

Boyd has a track record in these things, having worked with film directors such as Derek Jarman and Alan Clarke in his long career. But although Traverse Live! is being presented on the big screen, www.hibrow.tv will be launched in November as an Internet TV channel, presenting work from across the performing and visual arts.

“We’ve got arrangements with the BALTIC in Gateshead, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and various other institutions,” says Boyd. “The digital environment offers creative opportunities to do things with live performance that go beyond the experience of, say, watching a rock concert being streamed live.”

Hibrow is an ambitious enterprise that will be free to view and hopes to create revenue from sponsorship and advertising, supplemented by paid-for cinema-based screenings. Boyd believes there is great potential for arts organizations outside of London to reach new audiences through the broadcasts.

“I think we will get the audience that maybe reads about a play at The Everyman in Liverpool or something at Hull Truck Theatre, but isn’t able to go and see it,’ he explains. “And as well as a theatre audience there’s potential to crossover into the arthouse cinema audience.”

But isn’t all this anathema to the visceral buzz of live theatre? Not necessarily, believes Hill. “The way people view live performance is shifting and the Internet plays an enormous part in that. There’s an appetite to watch this kind of work, but on screen rather than live in the theatre. But what’s also interesting is that it hasn’t stopped people going to the theatre.”

The best of both worlds? Traverse Live! sounds like a good way to find out.

Traverse Live!, Monday Aug 23, 7pm. More details of broadcast here