dcf.cymru stimulus sheet · Drama · Year 11

Llanw (Tide): the live stream dossier

The play, the company, the theatre, the people and every figure on this sheet are invented. The problems are real ones: every one of them happens to real theatre streams.

1. The production

The play: Llanw (Tide) by Mererid Jenkins, performed by Cwmni Glannau in a 350-seat theatre in Swansea. 100 minutes, no interval. Bilingual: about a fifth of the lines are in Welsh.
The story: GWEN (50s) runs the family café in a village on Gower and has just had an offer to buy it. Her daughter MALI (17) has a secret. Gwen’s father IDRIS (82), “Tad-cu” to Mali, speaks mostly Welsh and has lived in the village all his life.
The stream: one live performance, streamed on a Saturday in March at 19:30. Tickets £12 per household. Picture quality 720p.
Cameras: three. Cam 1 is fixed at the back of the stalls and frames the stage opening as a wide shot. Cam 2 (stage left) and Cam 3 (stage right) are on tripods and can zoom in. One vision mixer chooses which camera goes out, live.
Sound: two microphones on the front edge of the stage. The actors do not wear their own microphones.
Access: automatic live captions using English speech recognition. No audio description, no BSL. In the theatre, English surtitles for the Welsh lines are projected on a screen above the stage opening — outside Cam 1’s frame.
What happens next: a later performance will be streamed live as an encore in two weeks. The company has asked for feedback so it can fix what went wrong.

2. The camera log for the key scene — the kitchen argument (71:30 to 79:00)

Times are minutes:seconds into the stream. A shot stays on screen until the next one in the list.

Time	Camera	Shot	What is happening on stage
71:30	Cam 2	Two-shot, medium: Gwen and Mali at the kitchen table	Mali building up to her news. Idris is in his armchair, upstage, reading.
72:40	Cam 3	Close-up: Mali	“I’ve already said yes. Glasgow. September.”
72:48	Cam 2	Close-up: Gwen	Gwen’s reaction. Six seconds, no words.
72:54	Cam 3	Close-up: Mali	Mali explains, and explains, and explains. Out of shot, upstage, Idris slowly gets up, puts on his coat and leaves through the back door without a word.
74:35	Cam 1	Wide shot	The argument moves around the table. Idris’s armchair is empty.
76:00	Cam 2	Extreme close-up: Gwen’s hands	Gwen slowly tears the buyer’s letter in half, then in half again.
77:10	Cam 1	Wide shot	Gwen, upstage at the back door, whispers “Paid â mynd” (“Don’t go”). The front-of-stage microphones do not pick it up.
78:50	Cam 1	Wide shot	Blackout.

Two other moments matter: from 41:10 to 44:05 the stream froze because the theatre’s internet upload failed — picture and sound were lost during the scene where Gwen reads the buyer’s letter, and there was no replay. From 62:00 to 70:00 Idris has an eight-minute speech in Welsh about his late wife and the sea. He walks the whole width of the stage, so the vision mixer stayed on Cam 1’s wide shot for all eight minutes. The captions showed [FOREIGN LANGUAGE].

3. How many people were watching

Concurrent viewers: the number of devices watching at that exact minute. A household watching on one TV counts once.

Minute	Viewers	What happens in the next ten minutes
0	1,240	Opening; wide shot of the café set
10	1,310	Busy café scene with the whole cast
20	1,296	Mali and Idris on the beach
30	1,284	Gwen on the phone to the bank
40	1,271	Stream frozen from 41:10 to 44:05; the letter scene is lost
50	1,029	Gwen and Mali after the letter
60	1,012	Idris’s Welsh speech from 62:00 to 70:00; wide shot only
70	994	Kitchen argument from 71:30 to 79:00
80	981	Final scenes
90	969	Final scene and curtain call
100	958	Stream ends

The same figures are in llanw-stream-viewers.csv.

4. Survey of online viewers after the stream

214 households answered. 61 of them said they understand Welsh; 153 said they do not.

Statement	Number who agreed
I could see the actors’ faces clearly at the important moments.	124
I could follow the Welsh-language parts of the play.	66 (58 who understand Welsh, 8 who do not)
The sound was clear throughout.	137
I would buy a ticket for the encore stream.	154

5. From the live chat

Time	Message
00:02	people in the theatre keep looking up at something above the stage?
12:40	love the café scene, you can see everyone at once
41:15	frozen
41:20	is it just me??
44:10	back!! what did we miss
44:30	why is Gwen crying, what was in the letter
63:05	can’t see his face at all
64:20	captions just say [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] for the whole speech
64:50	Dw i’n deall pob gair — mae e’n hyfryd. (“I understand every word — it’s beautiful.”)
73:40	wait where did Tad-cu go??
74:50	did anyone see him leave?
76:05	THE HANDS. that close-up
77:15	Gwen said something at the door? didn’t catch it
79:05	that ending [crying face] [clapping]

6. Three responses

Sioned, who was in the theatre: “The moment I will remember is Idris quietly putting his coat on while his daughter and granddaughter argued. Not one word — and the whole audience noticed him before they did. Then Gwen’s whisper at the door. You could have heard a pin drop.”

Kev, who watched the stream at home: “Brilliant acting, but I feel like I watched a different play from the one people in the theatre saw. I missed the letter because of the freeze, couldn’t follow the Welsh speech, and completely missed Tad-cu leaving.”

From a theatre review blog: “The camera direction was cautious but mostly clear, and Cam 2’s extreme close-up of Gwen’s hands is the most powerful image of the night. But the vision mixer follows whoever is speaking, not the story — and in this play the story is often told by the person who is silent.”