National Theatre Live: Rockets and Blue Lights (2021)

National Theatre Live: Hedda Gabler

Hedda and Tesman have just returned from their honeymoon and the relationship is already in trouble. Trapped but determined, Hedda tries to control those around her, only to see her own world unravel.

National Theatre Live: Twelfth Night

A ship is wrecked on the rocks. Viola is washed ashore but her twin brother Sebastian is lost. Determined to survive on her own, she steps out to explore a new land. So begins a whirlwind of mistaken identity and unrequited love. The nearby households of Olivia and Orsino are overrun with passion. Even Olivia's upright housekeeper Malvolia is swept up in the madness. Where music is the food of love, and nobody is quite what they seem, anything proves possible.

National Theatre Live: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

Against the backdrop of Hamlet, two hapless minor characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, take centre stage. As the young double act stumble their way in and out of the action of Shakespeare’s iconic drama, they become increasingly out of their depth as their version of the story unfolds.

National Theatre Live: Obsession

Gino is a drifter, down-at-heel and magnetically handsome. At a road side restaurant he encounters husband and wife, Joseph and Hanna. Irresistibly attracted to each other, Gino and Hanna begin a fiery affair and plot to murder her husband. But, in this chilling tale of passion and destruction, the crime only serves to tear them apart.

National Theatre Live: Salomé

An occupied desert nation. A radical from the wilderness on hunger strike. A girl whose mysterious dance will change the course of the world. This charged retelling turns the infamous biblical tale on its head, placing the girl we call Salomé at the centre of a revolution. Internationally acclaimed director Yaël Farber (Les Blancs, Hamlet) draws on multiple accounts to create her urgent, hypnotic production.

National Theatre Live: Angels In America — Part One: Millennium Approaches

The National Theatre's live theatrical production of Tony Kushner's two-part play 'Angels In America' about New Yorkers grappling with the AIDS crisis during the mid-1980s.

National Theatre Live: Angels In America — Part Two: Perestroika

America in the mid-1980s. In the midst of the AIDS crisis and a conservative Reagan administration, New Yorkers grapple with life and death, love and sex, heaven and hell. This new staging of Tony Kushner's multi-award winning two-part play, Angels In America: A Gay Fantasia On National Themes, is directed by Olivier and Tony award winning director Marianne Elliott.

National Theatre Live: Yerma

A woman is driven to the unthinkable by her desperate desire to have a child in Simon Stone’s radical production of Lorca’s achingly powerful masterpiece.

Company: A Musical Comedy

Set in modern upper-crust Manhattan, an exploration of love and commitment as seen through the eyes of a charming perpetual bachelor questioning his single state and his enthusiastically married, slightly envious friends.

National Theatre Live: Amadeus

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a rowdy young prodigy, arrives in Vienna, the music capital of the world – and he’s determined to make a splash. Awestruck by his genius, court composer Antonio Salieri has the power to promote his talent or destroy his name. Seized by obsessive jealousy he begins a war with Mozart, with music, and ultimately, with God.

Company

Set in modern upper-crust Manhattan, an exploration of love and commitment as seen through the eyes of a charming perpetual bachelor questioning his single state and his enthusiastically married, slightly envious friends.

National Theatre Live: Saint Joan

Josie Rourke directs Gemma Arterton as Joan of Arc in Bernard Shaw's electrifying classic. Performed at the Donmar Warehouse, and part of the NT Live series of broadcasts.

Hamlet at Elsinore

The ghost of the King of Denmark tells his son Hamlet to avenge his murder by killing the new king, Hamlet's uncle. Hamlet feigns madness, contemplates life and death, and seeks revenge. His uncle, fearing for his life, also devises plots to kill Hamlet. An historic BBC production taped on location in and around Kronborg castle in Elsinore (Denmark), in which the play is set.

National Theatre Live: Vanya

Andrew Scott brings multiple characters to life in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, filmed live in West End, London. Hopes, dreams, and regrets are thrust into sharp focus in this one-man adaptation which explores the complexities of human emotions.

National Theatre Live: King Lear

An aged king decides to divide his kingdom between his three daughters, according to which of them is most eloquent in praising him. His favourite, Cordelia, says nothing. Simon Russell Beale, whose recent appearances at the National include Timon of Athens and Collaborators, takes the title role in Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Newsies

A week in the life of the exploited, child newspaper sellers in turn-of-the-century New York. When their publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, tries to squeeze a little more profit out of their labours, they organize a strike, only to be confronted with the Pulitzer's hard-ball tactics.

Rent: Filmed Live on Broadway

Set in New York City's gritty East Village, the revolutionary rock opera RENT tells the story of a group of bohemians struggling to live and pay their rent. "Measuring their lives in love," these starving artists strive for success and acceptance while enduring the obstacles of poverty, illness and the AIDS epidemic.

National Theatre Live: Dear England

The country that gave the world football has since delivered a painful pattern of loss. Why can’t England’s men win at their own game? With the worst track record for penalties in the world, Gareth Southgate knows he needs to open his mind and face up to the years of hurt, to take team and country back to the promised land.

Henry V - Live at Shakespeare's Globe

Shakespeare’s masterpiece of the turbulence of war and the arts of peace tells the romantic story of Henry’s campaign to recapture the English possessions in France. But the ambitions of this charismatic king are challenged by a host of vivid characters caught up in the real horrors of war. Henry V, which opened the new Globe with the words ‘O for a muse of fire’, celebrates the power of language to summon into life courts, pubs, ships and battlefields within the ‘wooden O’ - and beyond.

National Theatre Live: Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

In the early hours of the morning on the campus of an American college, Martha, much to her husband George’s displeasure, has invited the new professor and his wife to their home for some after-party drinks. As the alcohol flows and dawn approaches, the young couple are drawn into George and Martha’s toxic games until the evening reaches its climax in a moment of devastating truth-telling.

National Theatre Live: The Cherry Orchard

Madame Ranevskaya is a spoiled, aging aristocratic lady who returns from a trip to Paris to face the loss of her magnificent Cherry Orchard estate after a default on the mortgage. In denial, she continues living in the past, deluding herself and her family, while the beautiful cherry trees are being axed down by the re-possessor Lopakhin, her former serf, who has his own agenda.

National Theatre Live: Collaborators

John Hodge's Collaborators centers on an imaginary encounter between Joseph Stalin and the playwright Mikhail Bulgakov.

National Theatre Live: Skylight

On a bitterly cold London evening, schoolteacher Kyra Hollis receives an unexpected visit from her former lover, Tom Sergeant, a successful and charismatic restaurateur whose wife has recently died. As the evening progresses, the two attempt to rekindle their once passionate relationship only to find themselves locked in a dangerous battle of opposing ideologies and mutual desires.

National Theatre Live: Julie

Wild and newly single, Julie throws a late night party. In the kitchen, Jean and Kristina clean up as the celebration heaves above them. Crossing the threshold, Julie initiates a power game with Jean – which rapidly descends into a savage fight for survival.

National Theatre Live: King Lear

Considered by many to be the greatest tragedy ever written, King Lear sees two ageing fathers – one a King, one his courtier – reject the children who truly love them. Their blindness unleashes a tornado of pitiless ambition and treachery, as family and state are plunged into a violent power struggle with bitter ends.

National Theatre Live: The Madness of George III

It’s 1786 and King George III is the most powerful man in the world. But his behaviour is becoming increasingly erratic as he succumbs to fits of lunacy. With the King’s mind unravelling at a dramatic pace, ambitious politicians and the scheming Prince of Wales threaten to undermine the power of the Crown, and expose the fine line between a King and a man.

National Theatre Live: Barber Shop Chronicles

For generations, African men have gathered in barber shops to discuss the world. These are places where the banter can be barbed and the truth is always telling. Follow along as we leap from a barber shop in Peckham to Johannesburg, Harare, Kampala, Lagos and Accra over the course of a single day.

A Memory of Two Mondays

Workers in an auto parts warehouse in 1933 New York City inhabit a bleak, dead-end world in the depths of the Depression where, at least, they have jobs. Introduced by its playwright, Arthur Miller, it was the first in a series of NET Playhouse programs concerning life in America during the Depression years.

National Theatre Live: Best of Enemies

In 1968 America, as two men fight to become the next president, all eyes are on the battle between two others: the cunningly conservative William F. Buckley Jr., and the unruly liberal Gore Vidal. During a new nightly television format, they debate the moral landscape of a shattered nation.

National Theatre Live: Medea

Medea is a wife and a mother. For the sake of her husband, Jason, she’s left her home and borne two sons in exile. But when he abandons his family for a new life, Medea faces banishment and separation from her children. Cornered, she begs for one day’s grace. It’s time enough. She exacts an appalling revenge and destroys everything she holds dear.

National Theatre Live: Cyrano de Bergerac

Fierce with a pen and notorious in combat, Cyrano almost has it all - if only he could win the heart of his true love Roxane. There’s just one big problem: he has a nose as huge as his heart. Will a society engulfed by narcissism get the better of Cyrano - or can his mastery of language set Roxane’s world alight?

Indecent

TV production of the Tony Award-winning play, based on the story of a Broadway acting troupe arrested for indecency for performing Sholem Asch's "God of Vengeance" and their fight against censorship.

National Theatre Live: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tennessee Williams’ twentieth century masterpiece Cat on a Hot Tin Roof played a strictly limited season in London’s West End in 2017. An alcoholic ex-football player drinks his days away, having failed to come to terms with his sexuality and his real feelings for his football buddy who died after an ambiguous accident. His wife is crucified by her desperation to make him desire her: but he resists the affections of his wife. His reunion with his father—who is dying of cancer—jogs a host of memories and revelations for both father and son.

The Crucible

Richard Armitage stars in Yael Farber's powerful production of Arthur Miller's timeless witch hunt parable.

National Theatre Live: Othello

Farewell the tranquil mind. A bright, headstrong daughter of a senator; elevated by her status but stifled by its expectations. A refugee of slavery; having risen to the top of a white world, he finds that love across racial lines has a cost. Wed in secret, Desdemona and Othello crave a new life together. But as unseen forces conspire against them, they find their future is not theirs to decide.

National Theatre Live: The Corn Is Green

One person can make all the difference. Miss Lily Moffat arrives in rural North Wales, determined to help young local miners out of poverty by teaching them to read and write. Lily soon spots talent in the unruly Morgan Evans, but when she faces growing resistance from the community, she does everything in her power to forge him a new future.