National Theatre

We haven’t given a star rating to a theatre show since March last year. It didn’t seem right in the autumn, when everyone who managed to open a play was simply doing their best against impossible odds, and even a couple of weeks back, it felt a little...

Before hitting the big time as a poet and performer, Kae Tempest – that’s the erstwhile Kate Tempest – wrote a string of well-received mid-sized plays, notably ‘Wasted’ and ‘Hopelessly Devoted’ (both for Paines Plough). They’ve had a busy last few years becoming...

Cancelled by the pandemic after just three performances of its initial run in Manchester, Winsome Pinnock’s ‘Rockets and Blue Lights’ has been a long time coming to the NT (although it did emerge on the BBC as a radio play last year). Directed by Miranda...

In a world with no Kent variant, Larry Kramer’s seminal Aids drama ‘The Normal Heart’ would have been revived at the NT earlier in 2021 – Dominic Cooke’s production was supposed to be the third show to play in the Olivier after it reopened last autumn,...

This twenty-fifth anniversary tour of Ayub Khan-Din’s British Asian classic comedy ‘East is East’ also holds the distinction of being the show that reopens the National’s Lyttelton theatre to the public after a spell as a film set. Iqbal Khan directs a...

Moira Buffini’s dark gentrification satire is another postponed 2020 National Theatre show finally getting a run at it in 2021. Nancy Carroll stars as the owner of a shabby old London manor house that shelters a motley group of people during a storm,...

The National Theatre’s first big musical of the pandemic era is ‘Hex’, an all-singing adaptation of the Sleeping Beauty myth that has raised a few eyebrows for being written by NT artistic director Rufus Norris (on lyrics) and his wife Tanya Ronder (book)...