If critics are to be believed, the use of video on the theatrical stage had become something of a fad by the early years of the new millennium. "Multimedia," wrote Lyn Gardner in the Guardian, "is a word I've come to dread in the theatre. There was a period around five years ago when you could hardly step inside a theatre to see a new play without encountering a bank of video monitors." Diedrich Diederichsen recounts the similarly exasperated tone of a Berlin critic, who wrote in December 2003 of her wish for the coming year that the Berlin Volksbuhne might resist using video projections just once. Opera, meanwhile, has been no stranger to this fascination with video. Toronto critic Peter Goddard recently wrote of "opera's video projection fetish," quoting director Astrid Janson on the "fashionable" use of "large projections, particularly in Wagner."