The UK’s theatres are shutting doors for the foreseeable future amid safety concerns over the coronavirus outbreak. With more and more people self-isolating or working from home to minimise the spread of the virus, theatregoers will be missing the thrill of live entertainment while theatre companies will be struggling to support artists and employees. Streaming platforms, though, provide a way for you to get your culture fix and support theatrical venues during these troubled times.

In today’s VOD age, you can rent and buy recordings of a huge variety of theatre plays online to watch in your living room, as well as subscribe to all-you-can-stream collections of people treading the boards,From Broadway shows and West End plays to RSC productions, hit musicals and opera favourites, this is your digital theatre guide:

Your Old Vic: Archive Streams

The Old Vic Theatre is now streaming productions for free online from its archive. Productions are available for a week after their initial streaming premiere. On 5th August, Jekyll & Hyde will be released – a dance thriller devised, directed and choreographed by Olivier Award winner Drew McOnie and inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale.

Cost
Free

Notable Productions
A Monster Calls, Mood Music

Ways to watch
YouTube

Old Vic In Camera: Live Streams

The Old Vic is staging socially distanced and coronavirus-safe productions from its empty auditorium and streaming them live on Zoom – with the number of tickets for each performance limited to the theatre’s usual seating capacity, priced from £10 to £65 to allow for a range of financial contributions. Up next is Three Kings, a new play by Stephen Beresford written for Andrew Scott, which runs from Wednesday 29th to Saturday 1st August. Find out more here. Previously, Lungs was streamed live online, starring Claire Foy and Matt Smith.

Cost
£10 to £65

Notable Productions
Lungs, Three Kings

Ways to watch
YouTube

BBC iPlayer

BBC iPlayer is streaming a string of Shakespeare plays, including the 2015 RSC Othello, which saw Lucian Msamati become the first black actor to play Iago, The Tempest with Colin Morgan and Roger Allam, and Christopher Eccleston in Macbeth. All of them are available until August 2020 – see the full line-up.

Cost
Free

Notable Productions
The Tempest
Macbeth
Othello

Ways to watch
BBC iPlayer

Royal Opera House: Live from Covent Garden

The Royal Opera House streamed three special performances live from the Royal Opera House in June – you can stream then online for roughly £4 each until 27th July through the ROH’s website. The line-up includes Dance of the Blessed Spirits, performed by Vadim Muntagirov, Das Lied von der Erde, performed by the Royal Opera House Orchestra and J.S. Bach: Concerto for Two Violins in D minor.

A production of Gounod’s Faust is also available to stream for free until 30th July, following its free stream on Friday 17th July.

On Friday 24th July, The Sleeping Beauty by the Royal Ballet will stream for free at 7pm and be available until 6th August. It will be followed by ZooNation’s The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party on Friday 31st July, which unites ballet and hip-hop.

Cost
Various

Notable Productions
Gounod’s Faust
The Sleeping Beauty (Royal Ballet)

Ways to watch
Roh.org.uk

London Symphony Orchestra

On Fridays, from 17th July to 21st August, live music will be returning to LSO St Luke’s in a Summer Shorts series. These short lunchtime recitals will be streamed live on YouTube and available for a week after the broadcast.

On Mondays, LSO has been streaming Coffee Sessions, short performances recorded at home. These are also on TYouTube indefinitely.

Cost
Free

Notable productions
After Romanticism
Schumann Symphony No. 3

Ways to watch
YouTube

Royal Albert Home

The Royal Albert Hall has been streaming exclusive sets and performances from artists – ranging from music to drawing – from either the empty Albert Hall, the individual artist’s home, or from the venue’s own archive of recordings throughout the lockdown. Here’s the full line-up

Cost
Free

Notable Productions
Kaiser Chiefs
KT Tunstall

Ways to watch
YouTube

DigitalTheatre

DigitalTheatre lives up to its name, leading the way with its impressive catalogue of sleekly recorded productions, which hail from theatres across the UK, including the Old Vic, the Young Vic, Manchester’s Palace Theatre and the RSC. There’s also some opera, dance and classical music on offer. If you’re an academic institution, you can also get free access to the whole lot, plus curriculum-linked resources including backstage insights, practitioner interviews and written analysis.

Cost
£7.99 rentals / £9.99 a month

Notable Productions
The Crucible with Richard Armitage (Old Vic)
Hamlet with Maxine Peake (Royal Exchange Theatre)
King Lear with Jonathan Pryce (Almeida Theatre)
Richard II with David Tennant (Barbican)
Into the Woods (Regent Park Open Air)
All My Sons with David Suchet (Apollo Theatre)

Ways to watch
TV, desktop, tablet and mobile through your web browser. Cast to your TV via Apple TV or Chromecast.

Marquee TV

Marquee TV is subscription platform that offers culture on-demand, serving up a collection of dance, opera, theatre, music and documentaries from around the world. Partners include the Globe Theatre, the RSC and the Royal Opera House. The platform is currently premiering new shows every Saturday, kicking off with the Royal Opera House’s La Traviata, directed by Richard Eyre. There’s also a decent collection of Shakespeare titles.

Cost
£8.99 a month (30-day free trial)

Notable productions
Phylidda Lloyd’s all-female The Tempest, Henry IV and Julius Caesar with Harriet Walter
David Tennant’s Richard II

Ways to watch
iOS, Android, Roku, Fire TV and Apple TV apps are all available

OperaVision

If you like opera, this is the place for you. Organised by Opera Europe, it’s an online hub for video streaming of opera productions, which essentially hosts YouTube recordings that are available for free – both live and for several weeks after on-demand. Expiry dates are clear and easy to spot.

Cost
Free

Notable productions
The Turn of the Screw (Britten)

Ways to watch
YouTube

BritBox

BritBox has bagged a new collection of productions from the Royal Opera, RSC and Donmar Warehouse, with 25 Shakespeare plays, a host of ballet performances and operatic recordings. Some of the RSC titles are also available on BBC iPlayer until September 2020.

Cost
£4.99 a month

Notable productions

King Lear, starring Antony Sher
Richard II, starring David Tennant
Macbeth, starring Christopher Eccleston.
Phylidda Lloyd’s all-female The Tempest, Henry IV and Julius Caesar with Harriet Walter
Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty (2017)
Puccini’s Madame Butterfly (2017)

Ways to watch
Britbox.co.uk

Globe Player

The Globe Theatre on London’s Southbank has its own on-demand platform that contains recordings of its own productions, mostly centred on Shakespeare – including, most impressively, every foreign-language production from its 2012 Globe to Globe festival.

Cost
£3.99 to £11.99

Ways to watch
Globeplayer.tv

Royal Court Theatre

The Royal Court Theatre is opening its doors – sort of – during the coronavirus lockdown with new installation Caretaker.

The durational installation by Hester Chillingworth is a livestream of the uninhabited stage, offering audiences some digital space, along with a few words of encouragement.

Cost
Free

Ways to watch
YouTube

Coronavirus Theatre Club

Brian Lonsdale, Sam Neale and Michael Blair – three actors from north-east London – are offering a platform to up-and-coming writers, directors and actors, calling people together to share their monologues and other scripted works. Those involved are given seven days to rehearse their work and be off book in time for the stream, with new work then streaming live at 7pm on Sunday nights through the club’s Twitter account: here.

Cost
Free

Notable Productions
All new productions

Ways to watch
Twitter

Met Opera On Demand

Moe than 700 full-length Met performances are brought together in this online streaming service, which is available worldwide. Titles are broken into chapters for handy viewing, especially for opera newbies.

Cost
$14.99 a month (7-day free trial)

Notable productions
Turandot (Puccini)
Manon (Massenet)

Ways to watch
Fire TV, iOS, Apple TV, Android, Roku

Medici.tv

A platform dedicated entirely to classical music, this is a wonderful collection of concerts and recitals, which lets you watch a decent number of them for free (anything labelled “Replay”). Subscriptions give you full access to the whole lot, with no ads and full HD.

Cost
£9.90 a month

Notable productions
Martha Argerich – Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3
Janine Jansen – Bernstein, Sibelius and Nielsen
Leif Ove Andsnes – Mozart and Strauss

BroadwayHD

This American streaming service is surprisingly available for UK theatre fans too and comprises a strong selection of recorded Broadway productions, ranging from recent revivals of Shakespeare to old musical favourites.

Cost
$10.79 a month (7-day free trial)

Notable productions
Noel Coward’s Present Laughter with Kevin Kline
Romeo & Juliet with Orlando Bloom
Phylidda Lloyd’s all-female The Tempest, Henry IV and Julius Caesar with Harriet Walter
Oklahoma! with Hugh Jackman
An American in Paris (2018)
Holiday Inn (2017)
Jerry Springer The Opera
RSC’s King Lear with Ian McKellen

Wigmore Hall

Wigmore Hall already has a collection of chamber music recordings from its Edwardian hall uploaded to its YouTube channel for on-demand streaming.

Cost
Free

Notable productions
Beethoven Festival Weekend

Ways to watch
YouTube

LIVR

A curio among the theatre streaming crowd, LIVR is a virtual reality platform that aims to put you on the front row of the theatre – and even lets you turn around to look at the rest of the audience mid-performance. Compatible with Google Cardboard, you can get a free headset sent to you in the post when you sign up, or choose a free credit instead to unlock a show for 30 days.

Cost
£5.99 a month (1-month free trial)

Notable productions
RUST

Ways to watch
iOS, Android, Samsung Gear VR, Oculus, PlayStation VR, HTC Vive

Netflix

Netflix’s planned filmed productions of Broadway’s The Prom and other shows may be on hiatus, but it’s already host to a number of other stage recordings, including Rodney King, Oh, Hello on Broadway, Springsteen on Broadway and a film adaptation of hard-hitting social drama American Son.

Cost
£8.99 a month (1-month free trial)

Radiohead

Radiohead is releasing a gig every Thursday night throughout the lockdown or until they run out of concerts to dig up from their archive recordings.

Cost
Free

Notable Productions
Live at Summer Sonic
Live in Berlin
Live in Buenos Aires

Ways to watch
YouTube

National Theatre at Home – Ended

The National Theatre has finished streaming its selection of NT Live productions for free on YouTube every Thursday. For the full line-up of plays released online, click here.

The Shows Must Go On! – Paused Until August

The Shows Must Go On is the new official YouTube channel that is streaming musicals for free each week. New productions will be released on Fridays and then be available for seven days. Read more here.

Cost
Free

Notable productions
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, starring Donny Osmond
Jesus Chris Superstar, starring Tim Minchin

Ways to watch
YouTube

The Rolling Stones – Ended

The Rolling Stones hosted Sunday streams of past concerts for free on YouTube. Gigs streamed at 8pm every Sunday until 7th June, with each concert available on-demand after.