The show goes on in Paris – through augmented-reality glasses

It’s Saturday night at Le Comédia theatre in central Paris and I’m staring at the stage through square plastic glasses. While the actors in the musical Mistinguett, Reine des Années Folles sing boisterously in French, the words appear simultaneously in English on a small screen in the right-hand lens. Though it’s not the same as watching the show unfettered, I find it surprisingly easy to follow the translated dialogue along with the action.

For visitors to the city who like the theatre but don’t speak French, new augmented-reality glasses, launched this week by Theatre in Paris, open up the choice of evening entertainment, and there are plans to introduce them at a variety of shows next year.

And while theatre attendance in the French capital is sharply down following November’s terrorist attacks, Theatre in Paris’s Christophe Plotard decided to go ahead with the planned launch. “The glasses are a world first and we felt the show must go on – we are resilient,” he said. “This technology is about uniting cultures through the arts – a way to get to know another culture.”

The glasses, designed by French tech company Optinvent and similar in look to Google Glass but with a larger screen and longer battery life, follow on from the company’s introduction of “surtitling” (translations shown above the stage or screen) for a selection of French plays and musicals last year.

“The aim was to give tourists and other non-native speakers access to more live entertainment beyond opera, and it has been a great success,” said Plotard. “The glasses are a further step. There’s no limit to the number of languages the show can be translated into: it’s up to the producer. We’ve had interest from everywhere, from Taiwan to the UK. They’re useful for the hearing-impaired, too, and for following the words in musicals in your own language.”

While the glasses (currently provided free) are much less distracting than surtitles, the battery-powered Wi-Fi equipment is still quite heavy and cannot be worn with normal glasses. But technology moves fast, and a lighter, wider model that can be used with any eyewear will launch next year.

Perhaps it marks the future of theatre for travellers, with language no longer a barrier. In a recent report commissioned by lastminute.com, experts predicted that technology of all kinds will be integrated further into performances, from projections to holograms, with audiences even directing the action on stage using real-time social media.

Plotard says the rise of immersive plays, such as Punchdrunk’s phenomenally popular Sleep No More in New York and The Drowned Man in London, where the audience wanders among the actors, makes the potential obvious: “There are definitely lots of possibilities for using smartphone, smartwatch or smartglasses features in theatre around the world – it is really exciting.”