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Tonight sees the first broadcast in what looks like it’s going to be a lockdown streaming sensation: National Theatre at Home. Basically, it’s a series of movie-quality films of some of the theatre’s landmark productions, and as an opener it’s picked a real crowd-pleaser.
‘One Man, Two Guvnors’ is Richard Bean’s update of a 1743 farce by Italian playwright Goldoni. James Corden plays a musician who starts working for two small-time crooks, who want each other dead. This involves a lot of running about, hiding in cupboards, pratfalls etc etc. According to one Time Outer, people were literally crying with laughter during a scene in which Corden has to serve dinner to his two guvnors simultaneously, while keeping them unaware of each other. (You’ll have to assess how you’re dealing with being enforcedly housebound to decide if this level of domestic tension is the kind of thing you can cope with right now.)
Corden has called it the ‘high point of my career’, and revealed at the time that he was black and blue after every rehearsal, in what Time Out called his ‘heroically committed physical performance’. It’s a bawdy seaside treat, and just the kind of thing we could do with right now.
The National Theatre’s ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’ streams for free on YouTube from 7pm (UK time) tonight (Thursday April 2). It’s available for one week.
Read our review of ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’ ahead of its air time.
Find out everything you need to know about the new streaming series from National Theatre at Home.
More of a musicals fan? Check out what’s now streaming from Andrew Lloyd Webber.
And here’s even more great theatre being streamed online right now.