National Theatre Live: No Man's Land

A teenage girl living in Baltimore in the early 1960s dreams of appearing on a popular TV dance show.

Adaptation of Arthur Miller's play.

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.

An affluent suburban couple's empty and gin-fueled lives are observed through the eyes of their neglected, eight-year old daughter.

This musical adaptation of the Studs Terkel book examines the average worker's viewpoint--showing that he or she is anything but average. Based on a series of interviews with real working people--construction workers, waitresses, firemen, secretaries, and cleaning women, Working is both an exploration of the individuals' occupations and a lament for lost hopes and dreams.

When a young mother speaks out against the Taliban, she and her husband are forced to flee their home and country with their three sons. Embarking on a long and terrifying journey across Russia and through Europe, they seek final refuge in the UK. But, as their eldest son’s life-threatening heart condition worsens and requires urgent surgery, their escape soon becomes a race against time. Amit Sharma directs this widely acclaimed stage version of The Boy with Two Hearts (BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week). Based on extraordinary real-life experiences, it is a powerful story of hope, courage, and humanity – and a heartfelt tribute to the NHS.

When an old adversary threatens Rome, the city calls once more on her hero and defender: Coriolanus. But he has enemies at home too. Famine threatens the city, the citizens’ hunger swells to an appetite for change, and on returning from the field Coriolanus must confront the march of realpolitik and the voice of an angry people.

Based on Michael Morpurgo's novel and adapted for the stage by Nick Stafford, War Horse takes audiences on an extraordinary journey from the fields of rural Devon to the trenches of First World War France.

Fifty years after Richard Wesley's original production of Black Terror, Richard Lawson directs a bi-coastal cast of revolutionaries on a daunting mission to free their people. As the Black Comrades Keusi, M'Balia, Geronimo, and Ahmed fight on the edge of life and death, the divide between them intensifies and widens.

'Must I remember?' Hamlet's father is dead. His mother has remarried. He is alone with his thoughts. Then, he speaks. Haunted by grief, and with his world spinning violently out of control, Hamlet has to make some decisions: forget or remember; live or die.

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.

At the Seisho Music Academy, the 99th Graduating Class is rehearsing for the annual production of the theatrical play, Starlight. Behind the scenes, however, an underground "Revue Starlight" audition, orchestrated by a talking giraffe, pits the students against each other in stage battles in order to shine as the top star. Karen Aijō, upon being reunited with her childhood friend Hikari Kagura, comes across these auditions and battles to become the top star alongside Hikari.

The Moorish general Othello is manipulated into thinking that his new wife Desdemona has been carrying on an affair with his lieutenant Michael Cassio when in reality it is all part of the scheme of a bitter ensign named Iago.

The story takes place entirely in a bedroom dominated by a couple's four-poster bed, taking them through fifty years of marriage, through happiness and sorrow, through good times and bad, through childbirth, parenthood, and the eventual sadness from the absence of their children. In the end, they face the future together, while remembering their past.

Embark on a journey from Jamaica to Britain, through the Second World War to 1948 – the year the HMT Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, England. The play follows three intricately connected stories. Hortense yearns for a new life away from rural Jamaica, Gilbert dreams of becoming a lawyer, and Queenie longs to escape her Lincolnshire roots.

The story of Margo Channing. Legend. True star of the theatre. The spotlight is hers, always has been. But now there’s Eve. Her biggest fan. Young, beautiful Eve. The golden girl, the girl next door. But you know all about Eve…don’t you…?

At the beginning of the 20th century, Leopoldstadt was the old, crowded Jewish quarter of Vienna, Austria. But Hermann Merz, a factory owner and baptised Jew now married to Catholic Gretl, has moved up in the world. We follow his family’s story across half a century, passing through the convulsions of war, revolution, impoverishment, annexation by Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. A company of 40 actors represent each generation of the family in this epic, but intimate play.

Fresh to the throne, King Henry V launches England into a bloody war with France. When his campaign encounters resistance, this inexperienced new ruler must prove he is fit to guide a country into war.

Two young people and their dæmons, with everything at stake, find themselves at the centre of a terrifying manhunt. In their care is a tiny child called Lyra Belacqua, and in that child lies the fate of the future. And as the waters rise around them, powerful adversaries conspire for mastery of Dust: salvation to some, the source of infinite corruption to others.

The ghost of the King of Denmark tells his son Hamlet to avenge his murder by killing the new king, Hamlet's uncle. Hamlet feigns madness, contemplates life and death, and seeks revenge. His uncle, fearing for his life, also devises plots to kill Hamlet. An historic BBC production taped on location in and around Kronborg castle in Elsinore (Denmark), in which the play is set.