Measure for Measure | Feature Trailer | Royal Shakespeare Company

See what audiences had to say about our new production of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, including on stage footage from the show.
Measure for Measure plays in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre until 29 August. For more info and tickets: bit.ly/2XOgeyd

[@TueSorensen]

I am a huge Shakespeare fan and also a huge RSC fan - but I am actually very disappointed with the videos you're posting to this channel. 30-second videos are so cheap and insubstantial that they are almost worse than nothing! Can't you please put together proper trailers (such as 2 minutes in length), and also spice it up with some interview material? Get serious, I prithee!

[@rodolphefonty9331]

Thank you Tue, you took the words right out of my mouth! i do hope you're heard. Every time the RSC has a trailer we have members of the audience saying 'wonderful' , 'thought-provoking', telling us how relevant it still is etc. No interest at all! Like you I love Shakespeare and I am always interested in the RSC productions;, so this type of empty talk really goes against the grain.

[@TueSorensen]

​@@rodolphefonty9331 Yes! We want MORE! Surely they can show us some slightly longer clips and add in a few comments from the cast behind the production.

[@EverymanTheatre]

Sadly, nearly all metrics show that most viewers don't watch longer-form content anymore, particularly when it comes to theatrical trailers. A two-minute theatre trailer will lose over half the audience after the first :30. Filming a three-hour-long show is about 5 hours of time, including set-up and at the very least an additional 9 hours of editing time just for the first draft edit. Then it must undergo several rounds of reviews and revisions, color grading, sound sweetening, title treatments, transitions and searching for music to add-in. Long-form videos are a valuable asset but don't achieve the same results that shorter form videos do, and are much more labor-intensive to produce.

[@rodolphefonty9331]

@@EverymanTheatre Thank you for your (long!) answer. Your first word is 'sadly' and I couldn't agree more: it is sad. Nevertheless I'm not sure you have to pander to the public's taste as shown by what you call metrics. People like you form the public's taste too, you could be active i.e. not only follow trends that are entirely created. Why not create a new trend? thank you for all the details about filming a 3-hour show; i knew it was a hard and long job, but your description is very interesting.

[@TueSorensen]

@@EverymanTheatre Surely, people who appreciate Shakespeare have longer attention spans than 30 seconds. If you look at movie trailers, 30 sec ones are only teasers; the final full trailer is still 2:30 minutes long. And while we're on the subject of filming full productions; is it not true that this is being done with a great many productions, but that the filmed version is never actually released on disc? I am under the impression that nearly all major productions are filmed at some point during their run (for scholarly and documentary reasons, if not for release purposes), yet only a tiny fraction of them are released to disc. I gather that some quarters believe that people will no longer go to the theatre if they can get the productions on disc, but I think the opposite is true. Theatre fanatics are just that: fanatics! Many of us would be encouraged and increasingly motivated to go to the theatre by being able to see past productions on a screen. And then, of course, there are those people around the world who never actually have the opportunity to attend theatres like the RSC and the National Theatre, and who would benefit enormously from being able to buy disc versions of the productions.