National Theatre Live: A Streetcar Named Desire

Tío Vania

Based on Shakespeare’s play, Timon of Athens tells the tale of conspicuous consumption, debt and ruin. Timon of Athens is a wealthy friend to the rich and powerful. With his riches, he showers hospitality on the city’s elite. Unfortunately, his associates don’t lend him a helping hand when he accidentally spends more than he has on resources. After a final banquet, Timon is forced to withdraw himself to a wasteland, living off nothing but roots and cursing bankrupt Athens.

A raucous, angry exorcism of relationships and assorted fears, shadowed by the Big One: the plague of AIDS.

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.

New York, 1971. There’s a party on the stage of the Weismann Theatre. Tomorrow the iconic building will be demolished. Thirty years after their final performance, the Follies girls gather to have a few drinks, sing a few songs and lie about themselves.

Caesar returns in triumph to Rome and the people pour out of their homes to celebrate. Alarmed by the autocrat’s popularity, the educated élite conspire to bring him down. After his assassination, civil war erupts on the streets of the capital. Nicholas Hytner’s production will thrust the audience into the street party that greets Caesar’s return, the congress that witnesses his murder, the rally that assembles for his funeral and the chaos that explodes in its wake.

Tiago Guedes returns to Dennis Kelly, the British playwright with whom he has already enjoyed success in his dizzying descent into the depths of human complexity. After Órfãos, the director and stage director now tackles The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas, a 2013 text about the banality of evil in the person of the man that Kelly's play scrutinizes in retrospect: "Existence is not what you thought it was until now. It is not honest, it is not kind, it is not fair. Most of the world has no idea about this; they believe in God, or Daddy, or Marx, or the invisible hand of the market, or honesty, or kindness. They go through life with their eyes closed, getting beaten up and screwed over. He's like that. You're like that. But a tiny part of us, let's call ourselves the resistance, knows the true nature of life. The world is ours for the taking. We are powerful and rich and have everything, because we will do whatever it takes.

Based on the 1891 play "Spring Awakening," this filmed stage drama examines the tensions and confusion of young people as their growing sexual awareness conflicts with the repressive social environment around them. The passionate kiss between two males might be the first envisioned for the stage since Christopher Marlowe's between Edward II and Gaveston.

In 1941 Hawaii, a private is cruelly punished for not boxing on his unit's team, while his captain's wife and second in command are falling in love.

A man thinks he is not the father of his presumed daughter.

Two young swordsmen, Akado Suzunosuke and Tatsumaki Rainoshin, arrive at the city of Edo in their quest to test and improve their skills. Soon they become involved in a conflict against a mysterious group of demonic criminals led by the king of hell, Taira no Masakado — a strugle to which both were destined since the moment they were born.

A boy who was once a perpetual outcast finds friends in a new boarding school. United with his new peers, he gets involved in a heated rivalry with a group of students from a neighboring school.

When a beautiful first-grade teacher arrives at a prep school, she soon attracts the attention of an ambitious teenager named Max, who quickly falls in love with her. Max turns to the father of two of his schoolmates for advice on how to woo the teacher. However, the situation soon gets complicated when Max's new friend becomes involved with her, setting the two pals against one another in a war for her attention.

Andrew Scott brings multiple characters to life in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, filmed live in West End, London. Hopes, dreams, and regrets are thrust into sharp focus in this one-man adaptation which explores the complexities of human emotions.

After being dumped by her live-in boyfriend, an unemployed dancer and her 10-year-old daughter are reluctantly forced to live with a struggling off-Broadway actor.

One of Shakespeare's greatest plays, The Winter's Tale, though written at the same period as The Tempest, smashes all the rules that The Tempest follows. Unity of time, place and action are hurled aside as we range across Europe, from court to country, from high tragedy to low comedy, across a time span of sixteen years. The Winter's Tale tells of a delusional and paranoid king who tears his family apart. But this is the new Shakespeare, after he completed his great tragedies, and the tough struggle for redemption yields flickers of hope. Initial darkness gives way to joy as Time leads the characters to a shattering conclusion...

Unpolished and ultra-pragmatic industrialist Jean-Jacques Castella reluctantly attends Racine's tragedy "Berenice" in order to see his niece play a bit part. He is taken with the play's strangely familiar-looking leading lady Clara Devaux. During the course of the show, Castella soon remembers that he once hired and then promptly fired the actress as an English language tutor. He immediately goes out and signs up for language lessons. Thinking that he is nothing but an ill-tempered philistine with bad taste, Clara rejects him until Castella charms her off her feet.

In the midst of the Hundred Years War, the young King Henry V of England embarks on the conquest of France in 1415.

Christopher, fifteen years old, has an extraordinary brain – exceptional at maths while ill-equipped to interpret everyday life. When he falls under suspicion of killing Mrs Shears' dog Wellington, he records each fact about the event in the book he is writing to solve the mystery of the murder. But his detective work, forbidden by his father, takes him on a frightening journey that upturns his world.

The Bergers, a blue-collar Jewish family living in an overstuffed tenement and undone by the Depression, struggle through hard times and dream of a better future in this 1972 production of Clifford Odets' pungent play. Personalities and politics clash as Odets' mélange of characters try to survive on pennies a day. Walter Matthau plays cynical World War I amputee Moe Axelrod, and Leo Fuchs portrays the family's iron-willed leftist grandfather.