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National Theatre

  • Theatre
  • South Bank
  • Recommended
  1. National Theatre, The Shed  (© Philip Vile)
    © Philip Vile
  2. © Philip Vile
    © Philip Vile
  3. © Philip Vile
    © Philip Vile
  4. Interior architecture (Rob Greig / Time Out)
    Rob Greig / Time Out
  5. National Theatre (Rob Greig / Time Out)
    Rob Greig / Time Out
  6. National Theatre architecture (Rob Greig / Time Out)
    Rob Greig / Time Out
  7. National Theatre interior (Rob Greig / Time Out)
    Rob Greig / Time Out
  8. National Theatre Stairs (Rob Greig / Time Out)
    Rob Greig / Time Out
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Time Out says

The world's greatest theatre?

Arguably the greatest theatre in the world, the Royal National Theatre is also one of London's most recognisable landmarks and perhaps this country's foremost example of brutalist architecture. It boasts three auditoriums – the epic, ampitheatre-style Olivier, the substantial end-on space Lyttelton and the Dorfman, a smaller venue for edgier work. It's got a firm foothold on the West End, thanks to transferring shows like 'War Horse' and 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time'. In summer, it spills out onto Southbank with its River Stage line-up of outdoor events. And its NT Live programme beams its greatest hits to cinemas across the globe.

NT Live is just one of the initiatives to issue forth from the golden reign of former artistic director Nicholas Hytner, which saw a canny mix of modernised classics, popular new writing, and a splash of hip experimental work fill out the houses night after night. Hytner's successor Rufus Norris has offered a programme that's stuck with many Hytner fundamentals but offered an edgier, more international spin, with a run of ambitious, experimental and – in the beginning especially – sometimes divisive works.

From 2025, former Kiln boss Indhu Rubsingham will take over as artistic director: the first woman and the first person of colour to hold the post.

The NT is a popular hangout for theatre fans, thanks to its warren-like array of spots to work and play. The real insider's hangout is The Understudy, a rough-and-ready riverside bar which brews its own lager and is thronged with theatre hipsters on pretty much any night of the week.

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SE1 9PX
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What’s on

Dear Octopus

  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Comedy

When ‘Dear Octopus’ opened on the West End it was 14 September 1938, Neville Chamberlain was on his way to Germany to appease Hitler and Britain stood uneasily – if not yet knowingly – on the brink of war. Dodie Smith’s comedy about ‘the family, that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to’ was lightweight stuff for heavyweight times. It was a smash hit. Gielgud starred in it, the King and Queen loved it. It ran for yonks, was revived many times and then sank, like so many other well-made inter-war dramas, into fairly well-deserved oblivion.  Eighty-odd years later, the most interesting thing about it is its audacious authoress, Dodie Smith: the London shopgirl and showgirl who really found her stride with fiction, namely ‘The Hundred And One Dalmatians’ and, later, one of the finest and most poignant coming-of-age novels in English, ‘I Capture The Castle’. Smith was a vividly romantic writer with candour, insight and verve, and she absolutely deserves renewed interest, and equal or superior credit to the languid men who dominated the interwar newspaper columns. But this classy but stolid revival of a soapy period comedy isn't going to make her case clear. The action, such as it is, opens in the entrance hall of a slightly peeling family pile, painted a sad arsenic green by designer Frankie Bradshaw. A family is gathering for the golden wedding celebration of mater and pater Dora and Charles (Lindsay Duncan and Ma

Nye

  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Drama

The British, in case you hadn’t noticed, tend to get a little sentimental about the NHS.  So it’s understandable that playwright Tim Price and director Rufus Norris are wary of dewy-eyed hagiography when approaching ‘Nye’, a new biographical drama about Aneurin Bevan, the firebrand Labour health minister who founded the service. With the title role played by the great Michael Sheen, there is a danger of going OTT in having the nation’s favourite current Welshman star as the nation’s favourite historical Welshman. And so Norris’s production has a determinedly trippy quality intended to counter the cliches. Billed as an ‘epic Welsh fantasia’, ‘Nye’ is largely presented as the stream-of-consciousness of an older Bevan, who is a patient in one of his own hospitals. There for an ulcer operation, he drifts in and out of the present and into recollections of his past, unaware he is dying of stomach cancer – something his MP wife Jennie Lee (Sharon Small) has determinedly kept from him. Crowned by a truly uncanny wig, Sheen is a delight as the fiery but unassuming Bevan. He never at any point changes out of his red striped pyjamas, a pleasingly absurdist touch at the heart of Norris’s stylish production, in which the green hospital ward repeatedly dissolves into the past to the sound of wheezing lungs.  It’s otherworldly in places, especially the scene where Tony Jayawardena’s overbearing Churchill collars Bevan in the Commons and groups of teacup-clutching MPs try to eavesdrop, movi

Underdog: The Other Brontë

  • Drama

The title of Sarah Gordon’s new drama refers, of course, to Anne Brontë. The youngest and shortest-lived of the prodigiously talented literary siblings, she never hit her sisters’ height of fame, in large part because after Anne’s death big sis Charlotte stopped her well-received magnum opus ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ from being republished, killing it stone dead while ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’ flourished. It sounds like Gordon’s play explores these events in a drama ‘about sisters and sisterhood, love and jealousy, support and competition’. Rhiannon Clements, Adele Thomas and Gemma Whelan star as Anne, Emily and Charlotte in Natalie Ibu’s production, which is co-produced with Newcastle’s Northern Stage.

London Tide

  • Musicals

The incomparable Polly Jean Harvey – aka PJ Harvey – has been an intriguingly low-key player in the works of director Ian Rickson for some years now, contributing the odd song here and there for well over a decade without it quite becoming a big deal.  Thrillingly, ‘London Tide’ sees her assume a more central role, as a topline creative in Ben Power’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s ‘Our Mutual Friend’, rechristened ‘London Tide’. Directed by Rickson, it follows the chain of events set into motion when a body is pulled out of the Thames. The cast includes Bella Maclean, Tom Mothersdale and Ami Tredea.

Boys from the Blackstuff

  • Drama

The absurdly prolific James Graham is surely too busy for a new play this year – he’s got a million screen projects and his musical ‘Tammy Faye’ is heading to Broadway – but here’s a transfer of one he did last year for Liverpool’s Royal Court. ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’ is, of course, Graham’s adaptation of Alan Bleasdale’s seminal ’80s drama about five unemployed men trying to negotiate their way through Thatcher’s decade. Kate Wasserberg directs the show, which will return to Liverpool for a run prior to a transfer to the Olivier theatre for 21 performances only. 

Mnemonic

  • Experimental

Even by Complicité’s lofty standards, 1999’s ‘Mnemonic’ is regarded as something truly exceptional. Devised by company founder Simon McBurney – and originally starring him –  it’s a wild ride show about humanity, memory and loss that starts as a jokey biochemistry lecture and ends up as something vast and transcendent involving an ancient body found in the ice and a woman searching for her vanished lover. You kind of jut have to see it, really, but if it lives up to the hype, it’ll change your life.  McBurney directs again, though it seems unlikely he’ll star this time: the only cast members confirmed so far are Richard Katz and Kostas Phillippoglou.  

The Hot Wing King

  • Drama

US playwright Katori Hall had her breakthrough in the UK when her play ‘The Mountaintop’ unexpectedly became a huge success, eventually beating Jez Butterworth’s ‘Jerusalem’ to best play at the 2010 Oliviers. We’ve seen surprisingly little of her work since bar the smash musical ‘Tina: The Tina Turner Musical’ (which she wrote the book for), but here’s a major UK premiere as Hall makes her National Theatre debut with her 2020 Pulitzer Prize winner ‘The Hot Wing King’, which follows hero Cordell Crutchfield’s heroic attempt to reclaim the crown at Memphis, Tennessee’s hot wing festival. Roy Alexander Weise directs a cast that will be headed up by Kadiff Kirwan as Cordell.

The Grapes of Wrath

  • Drama

John Steinbeck’s 1939 masterpiece about a desperate Oklahoma family forced to migrate to California to escape the ravages of the Dustbowl is one of the most famous books of the twentieth century. And Frank Galati’s award-winning 1990 adaptation is pretty much agreed upon as the definitive stage version. Throw in the great American actor Cherry Jones as the family matriarch Ma Joad and you have a very handsome summer blockbuster indeed for the NT, which will be directed by the reliable Carrie Cracknell. Further casting – including the central role of Tom Joad – is TBA.

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