As London's East End scrubs up for the coronation, Mr and Mrs Peachum gear up for a bumper day in the beggary business. Keeping tight control of the city's underground – and their daughter’s whereabouts.
People spoil things; there are so many of them and the last thing one wants is them traipsing through one’s house. But with the park a jungle and a bath on the billiard table, what is one to do? Dorothy wonders if an attic sale could be a solution.
Academy Award nominee and Tony Award-winner John Lithgow (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Shrek, 3rd Rock from the Sun) takes the title role in Arthur Wing Pinero’s uproarious Victorian farce, directed by Olivier Award-winner Timothy Sheader (Crazy for You and Into the Woods, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, London). In a similar vein to the National Theatre’s smash-hit classic comedies, She Stoops to Conquer and London Assurance, The Magistrate is sure to have audiences doubled up with laughter. When amiable magistrate Posket (John Lithgow) marries Agatha (Olivier Award-winner Nancy Carroll, After the Dance), little does he realise she’s dropped five years from her age – and her son’s. When her deception looks set to be revealed, it sparks a series of hilarious indignities and outrageous mishaps.
A screenwriter gets conned out of selling a script to a Hollywood producer by his brother, who pitches his own idea for a movie. This video recording of the 1982 Steppenwolf Theatre Company production was later broadcast by PBS.
National Theatre Live’s 2010 broadcast of Alan Bennett’s acclaimed play The Habit of Art, with Richard Griffiths, Alex Jennings and Frances de la Tour, returns to cinemas as part of the National Theatre's 50th anniversary celebrations. Benjamin Britten, sailing uncomfortably close to the wind with his new opera, Death in Venice, seeks advice from his former collaborator and friend, W H Auden. During this imagined meeting, their first for twenty-five years, they are observed and interrupted by, amongst others, their future biographer and a young man from the local bus station. Alan Bennett’s play is as much about the theatre as it is about poetry or music. It looks at the unsettling desires of two difficult men, and at the ethics of biography. It reflects on growing old, on creativity and inspiration, and on persisting when all passion’s spent: ultimately, on the habit of art.
Elyot Chase and Amanda Prynne are glamorous, rich, reckless…and divorced. Five years later, their love for one another is unexpectedly rekindled when they take adjoining suites of a French hotel while honeymooning with their new spouses. This chance encounter instantly reignites their passion, and they fling themselves headlong into a whirlwind of love and lust once more, without a thought for partners present or turbulences past. This Chichester Festival Theatre production of Noël Coward’s Privates Lives was filmed live at London's Gielgud Theatre.
Filmed stage production of Molière's comedic play The Miser about the dangers of greed.
A waitress and expert pie-maker dreams of a way out of her small town and rocky marriage.
Teens! Bikes! Feathered Hair! Love and revenge! Leotards and acid-washed denim! It’s all here in the legendary Eighties BMX-racing action-drama-romance RAD! Join Mike, Bill and Kevin as they spin, flip and slow-bike-dance their way into your hearts, LIVE in theaters nationwide on August 17th! Don’t miss it, if you want to be RAD!
In a remote village in Eastern Europe, around 1900, the young Motl Mendl is entranced by the flickering silent images on his father's cinematograph.
A production of Shakespeare's "As You Like It" filmed for television. After the overthrowing of the old duke by his tyrannical brother, the duke's daughter Rosalind disguises herself as a man and sets out to find her banished father while also counselling her clumsy suitor Orlando in the art of wooing.
A ship is wrecked on the rocks. Viola is washed ashore but her twin brother Sebastian is lost. Determined to survive on her own, she steps out to explore a new land. So begins a whirlwind of mistaken identity and unrequited love. The nearby households of Olivia and Orsino are overrun with passion. Even Olivia's upright housekeeper Malvolia is swept up in the madness. Where music is the food of love, and nobody is quite what they seem, anything proves possible.
Against the backdrop of Hamlet, two hapless minor characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, take centre stage. As the young double act stumble their way in and out of the action of Shakespeare’s iconic drama, they become increasingly out of their depth as their version of the story unfolds.
Set in modern upper-crust Manhattan, an exploration of love and commitment as seen through the eyes of a charming perpetual bachelor questioning his single state and his enthusiastically married, slightly envious friends.
Separated at birth, two sets of twins collide in the same city for one crazy day, as multiple mistaken identities lead to confusion on a grand scale.
Alan Ayckbourn's riotous exposure of entrepreneurial greed returns to the National Theatre, where it premiered in 1987, winning the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play.
Live performance of Offenbach's La Vie Parisienne
Popular revue recorded for television
In 2008, as the Large Hadron Collider searches for the Higgs boson, tragedy throws two sisters together. The collision threatens them all with chaos. Olivia Colman and Olivia Williams play the sisters in this drama from writer Lucy Kirkwood.