The National’s latest production of Hamlet opens with a bang: a sureness of style, atmosphere and refreshing comedic effect, accompanied by a performer, Hiran Abeyeskera (The Father and the Assassin, Life of Pi), whose presence promises a night of sparky originality. What a pity, then, that this promise peters out, and an ambitious conceit ultimately fails to deliver. It’s one thing presenting Hamlet as an almost childlike clown, whose emotions are heightened even before he’s aware of the rot in Denmark, but to do so at the expense of the tragedy – of one of Shakespeare’s most Read more ...

Star casting has, since the pandemic, done much to restore the fortunes of commercial theatre. And, when they can pull off a similar deal, the same applies to subsidised venues. If the downside is that many smaller institutions get left behind, the upside is clearly visible all over the West End.The latest stars to join Alicia Vikander and Andrew Lincoln in The Lady from the Sea or Brendan Gleeson in The Weir, are national treasures Stephen Fry and Olly Alexander in this West End transfer of the hit National Theatre revival of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 masterpiece, The Importance of Being Read more ...

The word "after" can be elastic when a modern writer is inspired by a classic. Nima Taleghani here stretches it to breaking point, although, to be fair his piece is also described as a new play. It is not so much "after" Euripides as a celebration of theatre with frequent sideways reference - mostly knowing and comic - to The Bacchae.In many ways this is the perfect play for the beginning of a new era at the National. The origins of Western theatre are acknowledged in the choice of a Greek classic, played in the Olivier auditorium, itself inspired by Greek amphitheatres. And yet it throbs Read more ...

Rosamund Pike is back. For her first stage appearance since 2010, when she played Hedda Gabler in Adrian Noble’s production for Bath Theatre Royal, the Hollywood superstar has chosen Inter-Alia, Suzie Miller’s follow up to her smash hit Prima Facie, which starred Jodie Cromer and whose London staging was at the Harold Pinter Theatre in 2022.With the same production team, but now at the National Theatre, Miller returns to her chosen milieu – English legal professionals – but now zooms in on the family scene of top judge Jessica Parks (Pike). As before, this is mainly a monologue, running at Read more ...

The first rule for brown people, says the main character – played by BAFTA-winner Adeel Akhtar – in this highly entertaining dramedy, is not to let white people know how badly non-whites treat each other. This provocative statement comes towards the end of Shaan Sahota’s debut, The Estate, and with hilarious irony it perfectly describes the main vibe of the family conflict at the heart of the play.Staged in the National Theatre’s Dorfman space, and one of the final productions programmed by former artistic director Rufus Norris, the play tells the story of a British Sikh politician whose Read more ...

The 2024 play at the National Theatre that put writer Beth Steel squarely centre-stage has now received a West End transfer. Its title taken from an Auden poem urging people to dance till they drop, it’s probably the most passionate show in that locale, and definitely the lewdest.It opens with the female equivalent of locker-room talk as the women of an extended family in what was once Notts and Derby pit country bicker and banter while preparing for the wedding of young Sylvia (Sinead Matthews). Topics of conversation range from the naughtiness of next door’s "sex pond”, ie hot tub, to the Read more ...

The National Health Service was established 77 years ago this month. Resident doctors are about to strike for more pay, long waiting lists for hospital treatment and the scarcity of GP appointments continue to dog political conversation, while the need for reform of the system provides a constant background hum. The idea for a national health service free at the point of need was always ambitious and remains challenging, but the NHS has become a cross between a religion and a beloved – if problematic – family. And it still deserves to be celebrated as it is here, even ending with Read more ...

With qualifying about to begin for the soccer World Cup, and England sporting a brand new manager, it’s fitting that James Graham’s Olivier-winning celebration of the previous boss returns to the National. Unusually for a play, Dear England comes with a new ending, one that wraps up Gareth Southgate’s eight-year tenure, to now include the fourth major tournament in which his team competed – and the final near-miss in an accomplished, laudable, but for many frustrating period. I didn’t see the first iteration, but it appears that this fictionalised account of the Southgate Read more ...

Plays about the Windrush Generation are no longer a rarity, but it’s still unusual for revivals of black British classics to get the full resources of the National Theatre. Guyana-born playwright Michael Abbensetts, who died in 2016, is often mentioned in books about black British drama, but his plays are infrequently revived.So it’s great to have a chance to watch Alterations, his vibrant comedy of 1978, the year his BBC soap Empire Road was also broadcast.The story is set entirely in a dusty upstairs tailoring workshop, whose boss is Walker Holt, an experienced Guyanese worker who dreams of Read more ...

Those with treasured battered copies of Noel Streatfield’s 1936 story of three young adopted sisters in pre-war London may have thrilled to the idea of a version coming to the National Theatre. But be warned: jolly though it is, it’s not the story of stagestruck pre-war Londoners you know.The bare bones of the book are still visible. Three little babies, brought to London from various points of the globe by a fossil-collecting explorer, Great Uncle Matthew (aka Gum), are left with his late niece’s orphaned daughter, Sylvia, and her nurse, Nana. The youngest, Posy, whose mother had been a Read more ...

If Harold Pinter’s work represents, as he slyly joked, the weasel under the cocktail cabinet, then Oscar Wilde’s represents the stiletto in the Victorian sponge – at a time when the stiletto was a slim dagger used for assassination. Beneath the fopperies and fripperies of his fin-de-siècle classic, every line draws blood as he skewers the false gods and hypocrisies of his age.On paper there’s plenty to tempt audiences to the National Theatre’s latest production of Wilde's searing attack on social convention. Maybe you’re seduced by the thought of a cast that includes current Dr Who, Read more ...

Contemporary reworkings of Greek tragedy run a very particular risk, that out of context the heightened actions of the original plays – the woefully poor judgement, the copious bloodletting, the rush to disproportionate vengeance and suicide – can seem like hapless histrionics and just a bit daft. Not so The Other Place. "Inspired" by Sophocles’ Antigone, Alexander Zeldin’s triumphant new play, which he directs, transmutes the seething passions and misdemeanours of myth into a contemporary English family home, with discomforting ease. It is strange, twisted yet terribly Read more ...