The Arena Spectacular from Ben Hur Live to Isles of Wonder

281 Pages·2016·2.51 MB·English

The Arena Spectacular from Ben Hur Live to Isles of Wonder:
Adaptation, Post-cinema and the Postcivil
Richard Whitby
PhD Humanities and Cultural Studies
London Consortium
Birkbeck, University of London
The work presented in this thesis is all my own

Richard Whitby
1st June 2016

2
Abstract
What is an ‘arena spectacular’ and why has this genre of live entertainment gained
international popularity in the twenty-first century? This study looks at three arena
spectaculars: Ben Hur Live, Batman Live and Walking with Dinosaurs Live – all adapted from
film or TV productions and performed in London’s O2 Arena between 2007 and 2012. I
contextualise the shows with the work of Cirque du Soleil, the Millennium Dome and the city
of Las Vegas. However, I argue that the format reached its fullest expression in Britain with
the opening ceremony to the London 2012 Olympics, Danny Boyle’s Isles of Wonder.
This study proposes that there are specific affective and economic factors within neoliberal
and post-cinematic society that make the spatialised, live and ‘unmediated’ performance of a
known image or hypertext into an attractive commodity. The arena spectacular should be
understood via post-cinematic image-making and the fluidity with which images move from
screen, to site and back will be explored here as a commercial process of ‘remediation’. An
aggregate of older devices and media that seems to be defined in heterotopic contradistinction
to a digital media regime, this format can be explained through contemporaneous qualities of
public space, immaterial labour, government and consumption.
This analysis is an attempt at grasping the ‘offer’ of these products – through their advertising,
merchandise and the shows themselves. What is their affordance; what experiences do they
allow and how does this benefit both consumers and producers? Despite their economic and
cultural marginality, perhaps these entertainment productions can be seen in some ways as
archetypal products of the early twenty-first century.

3
Contents
Prologue 7
Introduction: What is an Arena Spectacular? 16
Chapter 1: Post-cinema 61
i. Ben Hur Live 63
ii. Walking with Dinosaurs Live 90
Chapter 2: The Postcivil
Introduction – ‘The Home of Spectacular
122
Cultural Events’
i. The Millennium Dome 133
ii. Batman Live 159
iii. Las Vegas and Cirque du Soleil 189
Chapter 3: Isles of Wonder 220
Conclusion 250
Bibliography 261

4
List of Illustrations
NB – illustrations have been mostly removed for copyright reasons
Figure 1 Official poster, Ben Hur Live, 2009 18
Figure 2 Ben-Hur DVD case using original film poster from 1959, 19
2009
Figure 3 Crucifixion scene, Ben Hur Live, 2009 20
Figure 4 Chariot Race, Ben Hur Live, 2009 (promotional still) 21
Figure 5 Still from advert for Picturehouse Cinemas 2013 46
Figure 6 Alexander von Wagner The Chariot Race, 1882 65
Figure 7 Poster for 19th century stage version of Ben-Hur 66
Figure 8 Ben Hur Live, 2009 (promotional still) 79
Figure 9 Still from The Great Train Robbery, 1903 80
Figure 10 and 11 Stills from video advert for Batman Live, 2011 86
Figure 12 Ben Hur Live at the O2, London, 2009 87
Figure 13 Walking With Dinosaurs Live programme, 2013 93
Figure 14 Walking With Dinosaurs Live programme, 2013 94
Figure 15 Walking With Dinosaurs Live promotional photograph 95
Figure 16 and 17 Stills from advert for Picturehouse Cinemas 108
Figure 18 Walking With Dinosaurs Live promotional photograph 119
Figure 19 Pre-set ‘home screen’ on Samsung mobile phone on O2 123
network, 2012
Figure 20 Advert promoting Liverpool as a tourist destination, 2014 130
5
Figure 21 Illustration from The Millennium Dome, Wilhilde, 1999 157
Figure 22 Image from Batman Live programme 2011 163
Figure 23 Fight scene, Batman Live 165
Figure 24 MCM Expo, 2011 178
Figure 25 Batman Live programme page on the making of the show 180
Figure 26 Still from video advert for Batman Live, 2011 187
Figure 27 Still from Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away, 2012 194
Figure 28 Still from Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away, 2012 195
Figure 29 Royale de Luxe’s Sea Odyssey in Liverpool, 2012 215
Figure 30 Still from television broadcast of Isles of Wonder, 2012 224
Figure 31 Still from television broadcast of Isles of Wonder, 2012 226
Figure 32 Photograph of 2010 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony 228
Figure 33 Still from television broadcast of Isles of Wonder, 2012 228
Figure 34 Still from Olympia, 1938 230
Figure 35 Still from Olympia, 1938 231
Figure 36 Still from television broadcast of Isles of Wonder, 2012 232
Figure 37 Still from television broadcast of Isles of Wonder, 2012 233
Figures 38 and 39 Stills from television broadcast of Isles of Wonder, 2012 247
Figure 40 How to Train Your Dragon and How to Train Your Dragon 252
Live

6
Prologue
The first arena spectacular that I saw was Ben Hur Live at the O2 Arena in 2009, proposed in
its promotional material as:
a breathtaking combination of light, sound, water, wind and pyrotechnic effects in a
show performed in the round, like an ancient arena […] The production will be
accompanied by an emotional symphonic soundtrack, an English speaking narrator, as
well as 400 performers and 100 animals. (The O2 website, 2009)
A poster for the show, which appeared on a huge billboard over a large roundabout near where
I was living in East London, showed a chariot pulled by four horses racing towards the viewer.
The poster’s large lettering and graphics were reminiscent of Hollywood film posters from the
1950’s but also nineteenth-century paintings of the classical world. An online video-trailer
tantalisingly showed close-ups of charioteers preparing for a race, shot in cinematic high
contrast and embellished with dramatic sound effects, who then careered out into a roaring
arena, the crowd incongruously bristling with camera flashes.
I approached this show with an interest in the adaptation of existing narratives into opera, film,
novels and other forms. These narratives include ancient texts such as Greek myths and more
recent examples – Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur was first published in 1880. The proposed
scale of the production put me in mind of grand opera, as well as the cinematic epic – the
category to which the most famous iteration of Ben-Hur, William Wilder’s film version from
1959, belongs. As part of the complex known as The O2, the ‘O2 Arena’ has its own narrative
as an adaptation of the Millennium Dome. Perceived as an embarrassing failure after it opened
in 2000 (see chapter 2), then bought by American company AEG and refitted by architects
Populous, it emerged in 2007 as a popular venue for live music, comedy, sport and various
other performances. John Prescott, part of the Labour government responsible for its delivery,
has claimed that it is ‘the most popular venue in the world’ (BBC One website, 2009). There
had by that time been a flurry of stage adaptations of films such as The Lion King (dirs. Roger
Allers, Rob Minkoff, 1994 – stage version first performed in London 1999 [John, 1997]) and
7
The Lord of the Rings (dir. Peter Jackson, 2001 – stage version 2006 [Rahman, 2006]), but
these were based on more recent cinema successes and extensions of recognisable brands, as
Disneyland is an extension of Disney’s films. Ben Hur Live seemed different. Although the
show did appear a neat fifty years on from the Wilder film, there seemed no real reason to
resurrect the Ben-Hur story at that particular moment other than the availability of the arena
space itself and the continuity that was suggested between it and the ancient Roman arena. The
show seemed like an unusual collision between two objects: the famous film and the arena
space. As the result, Ben Hur Live, comprises of ‘Ben-Hur’: the film (although the show drops
the hyphen from its hero’s name), and ‘Live’: the arena.
I went to the show curious about this apparently new form of entertainment; wanting to see
how the elements I knew well from the 1959 film would be rendered in a live, in-the-round
arena production. A large part of my interest was formal and technical – just how was this
going to happen? I paid around £50 for a seat somewhere high up the banks of the arena
(‘ring-side’ seats were far more; private boxes more again). Implausibly, the key scenes would
have to include a sea battle between pirates and Roman galleys, a high-speed (and for many
participants fatal) chariot race, visits to both a leper colony and imperial Rome and the
crucifixion of Jesus Christ – these all being vital set pieces in the original narrative. This is
what we had been promised but how would these possibly take place in front of our eyes, live?
And yet, they did. The particularities will be detailed elsewhere, but it did indeed involve
thousands of people in a huge arena, watching a theatrical invocation of the Ben-Hur narrative,
with all the formal ingredients promised, including a narrator relaying Latin and Aramaic
dialogue in English, live animals and hundreds of performers. In it I found things I recognised
from live rock music, cinema, sport, historical re-enactments and more, lashed together into a
hybrid spectacle. There were some difficulties in the legibility of the promised and delivered
hybrid. The chariot race was inevitably slow looking, compared to the tightly edited film
sequence most of us probably knew. The audience seemed not to know what to do when the
crucifixion appeared – some cheered. Despite the anachronisms, which had seemed enough of
8
a part of the marketing so as to suggest a certain irony in the show, the whole thing was
seemingly carried out with total seriousness and great emphasis on various kinds of
authenticity. There really was a symphonic soundtrack, real live animals, a script performed in
ancient dead languages, a celebrity appearance, in Stuart Copeland as the narrator (composer
of the show’s soundtrack and drummer in The Police) and apparently real danger to the
performers in the race scene.
This particular ‘spectacular’ was not an immediate financial or critical success but, over the
next few years, more ‘arena spectaculars’, as these shows are called, came to The O2 Arena
and other similar arenas around the country. These were also often adapted from screen-based
originals, such as Walking with Dinosaurs Live, first arriving in Europe in 2009 and based on
the BBC television programme Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) and Batman Live (2011)
benefitting from the extreme popularity of the most recent Batman films. These two in
particular certainly found an audience and have been touring the world’s arenas since their
first performances.
Why does anyone (myself included) want to see one of these shows? What are the attractions
of these events to twenty-first century audiences? They seemed to me to paradoxically include
imperatives of both rarefied high-culture – which uses the exclusivity of one-off performances,
unique artefacts and high ticket prices – and commercial, ‘industrial’ entertainment – which
insists on huge dissemination, recognisable stars and brands and enormous but geographically
dispersed audiences. They also seem to be built upon a desire for physical proximity to
fictional characters, as if the barrier of the cinema, television or computer screen was being
made permeable. These shows offer exclusivity through scarcity in a media landscape that
could be characterised by the easy availability of media over the internet and via television: in
2011 a promotional flyer read ‘THE ONLY WAY TO EXPERIENCE BATMAN LIVE ON
STAGE’. Hyperbole in official statements as well as in advertising seems to be necessary to
demonstrate the unique excess of the productions and thereby attract audiences:
9
BEN HUR LIVE©: The O2 Welcomes its Biggest Epic Yet […]David Campbell,
Chief Executive of AEG Europe, owners and operators of The O2, added: “When I
heard about the concept for BEN HUR LIVE© I couldn’t quite believe it. This is
going to be THE show of next year” (The O2 website, 2009)
The promotion for the shows invoke singularity and uniqueness; terms such as ‘real’ and
‘authentic’ are often used. A promotional flyer in 2011 read ‘Totally authentic, bold and awe-
inspiring, BATMAN LIVE will be a completely new way to experience the world of Batman’.
Indeed, marketing for arena spectaculars often claims a kind of spectatorial absorption or
immersion in a ‘world’ as a sign of ‘realness’; Geoff Jones writes in the Batman Live
programme ‘When you first come into the arena and you see the city-scape, and hear the
sounds of the city and the sun setting, and you’re really in Gotham City, you’re a part of
Gotham City’ (Batman Live programme, 2011). Again, with Walking With Dinosaurs Live:
Watch them walk. Hear the roar. Be there as they fight for survival and supremacy.
From the ripple of their skin to the glint in their eye, you will know the dinosaurs
really are back! (Walking with Dinosaurs Live website, 2009)
Such rhetoric implies that there is an ‘original object’ somewhere, that is being approached
from every imaginable direction, looking for the ultimate articulation of that original object.
Ben Hur Live and Walking With Dinosaurs Live claim some degree of historical authenticity,
with Ben Hur Live’s use of dead languages, and Walking With Dinosaurs Live’s pseudo-
nature-documentary format (‘[m]arvel at the story of their 200 million year domination of life
on earth’ [ibid.]). Part of the offer of ‘authenticity’ prevalent in each of the shows’ promotion
is a version of excess and exuberance, both in aesthetic terms and in the use of resources.
These shows cost millions to put on; they involve a lot of people and a lot of labour. For
example, Walking With Dinosaurs Live is aiming to ‘amaze and delight’, as one of the ‘largest
and most acclaimed shows to come out of Australia’ (Gerry Ryan, Walking With Dinosaurs
Live programme, 2012):
10