Why London's top theatre is coming live to a place near you

Concerts and stand-up comedy appear to move from stage to screen reasonably successfully. Some would even argue that concerts are best enjoyed from the comfort of your living room rather than in large

arenas where the musicians often appear like pin-pricks and a warm beer sets you back a fiver.

However, historically whenever a stage show has been recorded for a later screening on television, something has invariably been lost in translation.

All that changed last summer when Helen Mirren and Dominic Cooper appeared on the stage of the National Theatre in London in a production of Phdre. The performance on June 25 was revolutionary. For the first time, the best seats in the house were not in the theatre but in venues around the country, as the play was broadcast simultaneously live to hundreds of cinemas.

Under the banner NT Live, two other shows – Shakespeare's All's Well that Ends Well and the Mark Ravenhill adaptation of Terry Pratchett's Nation – have been broadcast the same way and the inaugural season comes to a close next week with a live performance of Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art.

Travelling to see the play in London is an expensive business.

Unless you're lucky enough to queue up and get one of the coveted 10 seats, you could pay 85 for two tickets – and that's before you book travel to London from Yorkshire.

The cost of attracting audience members from outside the capital had long troubled Nicolas Hytner, artistic director of the theatre, and its head of digital media, David Sabel. Although based in London, the clue's in the title: the National Theatre is owned by all of us.

Sabel says: "We're a nationally funded organisation paid for by

taxpayers all over the country. NT Live allows us to serve the whole of the nation and make our shows available to people around the country who want to see them, without having to travel all the way here."

As much as the art world might try to resist the gravitational pull towards the capital, the fact is when Helen Mirren chooses to go on stage with Phdre, she does so at the National. When The Habit of Art goes on tour later this year (when it will visit Leeds) it will be with a perfectly good, but second string, cast.

If you want to see Frances De La Tour as the stand-in director and Richard Griffiths as WH Auden in Bennett's play, then you have to travel to London – or now, thanks to NT Live, to your local cinema.

Adrian Scarborough, who plays Pete in Gavin and Stacey and who has appeared in films including Robert Altman's Gosford Park and The Madness of King George, is currently playing Humphrey Carpenter in The Habit of Art.

When we speak, he is in the middle of a week-and-a-half break, getting ready to go back into the theatre and prepare for the live broadcast.

"It's very exciting," says Scarborough."I've not actually done it before, but we've got a couple of people in the cast who have and they are really enjoying winding us up and trying to make us worry."

No stranger to switching between television, stage and film,

Scarborough has been reminded repeatedly, along with the rest of the cast, that their performances should not change at all when the cameras come in.

"We want to give the same performance that an audience would see if they came to the National, only it will be seen by thousands around the country," he says.

Next Thursday, the theatre's stalls will be closed to the public, with audience members able to buy tickets to sit in the balcony area, on the understanding that it is the view of the thousands of people around the country, not the live audience, that will be the priority.

David Sabel says: "The cameras come in, we have a rehearsal, a

recording which we then watch back, give final notes and then we record and broadcast the show live around the country.

"It's not the same as being in the theatre, but it is as close as we can get with the technology we have available now."

n The Habit of Art will be screened on April 22, at 6.45pm at Bradford's National Media Museum, the Harrogate Odeon, Cineworld in Hull and York City Screen. For more details, log on to www.nationaltheatre.org.uk