AN EXCEPTIONAL SERIES OF PLAYS CAPTURED LIVE FOR PRESENTATION AROUND THE WORLD DURING THE LONDON SEASON.

National Theatre Live is a groundbreaking initiative to screen captured live performances from
Britain's stage to cinemas worldwide.

The first two highly successful seasons included highlights such as Helen Mirren in Phèdre, Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art, Derek Jacobi as King Lear (from the Donmar Warehouse), Danny Boyle's controversial Frankenstein, Zoe Wanamaker in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and the 5 star comedy One Man, Two Guvnors - all captured live in high definition.

THE KITCHEN
by Arnold Wesker

SAT 12 NOVEMBER 2011 at 1.00pm and
SUN13 NOVEMBER 2011 at 1.00pm*

1950s London. In the kitchen of an enormous West End restaurant, the orders are piling up: a post-war feast of soup, fish, cutlets, omelettes
and fruit flans.
 
Thrown together by their work, chefs, waitresses and porters from across Europe – English, Irish, German, Jewish – argue and flirt as they race to keep up. Peter, a high-spirited young cook, seems to thrive on the pressure. In between preparing dishes, he manages to strike up an affair with married waitress Monique, the whole time dreaming of a better life. But in the all-consuming clamour of the kitchen, nothing is far from the brink of collapse.
 
Arnold Wesker’s extraordinary play premiered at the Royal Court in 1959 and has since been performed in over 30 countries. The Kitchen puts the workplace centre stage in a blackly funny and furious examination of life lived at breakneck speed, when work threatens to define who we are.

COLLABORATORS

A new play by John Hodge (screenwriter of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave)

SAT 14 JANUARY2012 at 1.00pm and
SUN 15 JANUARY2012 at 1.00pm*

Moscow, 1938. A dangerous place to have a sense of humour;
even more so a sense of freedom.
 
Mikhail Bulgakov, living among dissidents, stalked by secret police, has both. And then he’s offered a poisoned chalice: a commission to write a play about Stalin to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. Inspired by historical fact, Collaborators embarks on a surreal journey into the fevered imagination of the writer as he loses himself in a macabre and disturbingly funny relationship with the omnipotent subject of his drama.
 
John Hodge’s blistering new play depicts a lethal game of cat and mouse through which the appalling compromises and humiliations inflicted on any artist by those with power are held up to scrutiny.  Alex Jennings plays Bulgakov and Simon Russell Beale, Stalin.

THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
by William Shakespeare

SAT 24 MARCH 2012 at 1.00pm and
SUN25 MARCH 2012 at 1.00pm*

I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?
Sleeping or waking? mad or well advised?
Known unto these, and to myself disguised!
 
Two sets of twins separated at birth collide in the same city without meeting for one crazy day, as multiple mistaken identities lead to confusion on a grand scale. And for no one more so than Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant Dromio who, in search of their brothers, arrive in a land entirely foreign to their distant home.  A buzzing metropolis, to the outsiders it appears a place of wonderment and terror, where baffling gifts and unexplained hostilities abound.
 
Consistently recognised by strangers, the visitors question their very selves as the turmoil escalates. Meanwhile, Aegeon, father to the Antipholus twins, has been captured searching for his sons and, as an
illegal immigrant, is sentenced to death at sunset.  Shakespeare’s furiously paced comedy will be staged in a contemporary world into which walk three prohibited foreigners who see everything for the first time. 
Lenny Henry plays Antipholus of Syracuse.

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