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National Theatre

The world's greatest theatre?
  • Theatre | Public and national theatres
  • South Bank
  • Recommended
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Anya Ryan
Written by Anya Ryan
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Time Out says

What is it? 

Arguably the greatest theatre in the world, the Royal National Theatre is also one of London's most recognisable landmarks and perhaps this country's foremost example of brutalist architecture. It boasts three auditoriums – the epic, ampitheatre-style Olivier, the substantial end-on space Lyttelton and the Dorfman, a smaller venue for edgier work. It's got a firm foothold on the West End, thanks to transferring shows like War Horse and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. In summer, it spills out onto Southbank with its River Stage line-up of outdoor events. And its NT Live programme beams its greatest hits to cinemas across the globe.

NT Live is just one of the initiatives to issue forth from the golden reign of former artistic director Nicholas Hytner, which saw a canny mix of modernised classics, popular new writing, and a splash of hip experimental work fill out the houses night after night. Hytner's successor Rufus Norris has offered a programme that's stuck with many Hytner fundamentals but offered an edgier, more international spin, with a run of ambitious, experimental and – in the beginning especially – sometimes divisive works.

From 2025, former Kiln boss Indhu Rubsingham will take over as artistic director: the first woman and the first person of colour to hold the post.

Why go? 

Of course, the main reason to go to the National Theatre is to see a play. Who knows? You could be lucky enough to nab a ticket to the next big hit, following in the footsteps of The History Boys or People Places and Things. But, the building has other features too. If you're free on a weekday afternoon (except Friday) take a roam around the National Theatre's archive to soak up some theatre history. Or, the bookshop on the theatre's ground floor is the perfect place to pick up a gift for a friend. 

Don't miss:

The NT is a popular hangout for theatre fans, thanks to its warren-like array of spots to work and play. But the real insider's hangout is The Understudy, a rough-and-ready riverside bar which brews its own lager and is thronged with theatre hipsters on pretty much any night of the week.

When to visit:

The National Theatre building is open from 10am-11pm every day apart from Sunday. Show times vary depending on the theatre, but usually start between 7-7.30pm

Ticket info:

Tickets are availble from the National Theatre website and prices vary.

Time Out tip: 

If you're looking for cheap seats, the NT releases £10 tickets each Friday at 1pm for the following week. The link is here.

Details

Address
South Bank
London
SE1 9PX
Transport:
Rail/Tube: Waterloo
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What’s on

The Importance of Being Earnest

Oscar Wilde’s drawing room comedy pretty much invented twentieth century British comedy, and as such it’s become something of a cliché. It’s not that ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ is never staged – it was last seen in the West End in 2018 – so much as the major theatres tend not to touch it. The NT hasn’t tackled it since the early ’80s, but here, intriguingly it is, finally getting a splashy Christmas revival that’ll star newly-minted Timelord Ncuti Gatwa as lusty young idler Algenon, who alongside his BFF Jack (Hugh Skinner) must infiltrate the stately home of the formidable Lady Bracknell in order to go a-wooing.  It’s a great cast and Gatwa alone will ensure it sells out its relatively brief festive run. But is there anything new to be found in Wilde’s play? If there is, director Max Webster is the man to find it – with his extravagent visual style and innovative recent takes on Shakespeare (notably his binaural ‘Macbeth’ with fellow Doctor David Tennant) you can expect something more than period dress and wobbly country house sets. 
  • Comedy

Ballet Shoes

The National Theatre’s big family Christmas show is the first ever major stage adaptation of Noel Streatfeild’s classic 1936 children’s novel. ‘Ballet Shoes’ follows a trio of very different adopted sisters raised in the home of an absent-minded palentologist who turn to ballet to make a living when their adopted father Gum fails to return from a lengthy expedition. Adapted by rising star Australian playwright Kendall Feaver and directed by Katy Rudd – who did the honours with the NT’s smash ‘The Ocean at the End of the Lane’ – the cast will be led by Melanie-Joyce Bermudez, Grace Saif and Daisy Sequerra as Petrova, Pauline and Posy Fossil, the three sisters.
  • Drama

Dear England

4 out of 5 stars
‘Dear England’ returns to the National Theatre in March 2025. This review is from June 2023. Now onto its fifty-seventh year of hurt, the capacity of the English men’s football team to be the focal point of ruinous national self-mythologization is well documented. As such, a play about the squad’s resurrection under Gareth Southgate feels like a potentially hubristic idea – dangerously overhyping a gifted man who still hasn’t taken home any actual silverware.  However: ‘Dear England’ is written by James Graham, a playwright who has made genuinely classic work out of such esoteric subjects as the quiz show ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’, and the Labour whips office during the 1970s. Unlike the England team, his form is so impeccable that you kind of have to trust that whatever he has planned is probably going to work. And with ‘Dear England’, he’s hit the back of the net once again. Reuniting Graham with Almeida boss Rupert Goold (following last year’s musical ‘Tammy Faye’ and 2017’s Rupert Murdoch drama ‘Ink’), ‘Dear England’ essentially works because Graham and Southgate are interested in the same thing: why is the England men’s team burdened with such high expectations? And what do those expectations do to the psychology of both the team and the nation? Helpfully, Southgate’s penalty miss against Germany in Euro ‘96 is the perfect embodiment of England’s problems. Goold’s widescreen production starts off with a flashback to it, and when we first meet him, it’s come to def
  • Drama

Here We Are

He may have been the greatest composer of musicals in history, but Stephen Sondheim’s final musical was, appopriately enough, too arty for Broadway: the posthumously produced Here We Are debuted at major NYC arts centre The Shed in 2023, where its mash up of two disturbing arthouse classics by Luis Buñuel received warm if not uncritical notices, with the general consensus being that in terms of songs, the first half – based upon The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie – felt a lot more finished than the second – based upon The Exterminating Angel. Nonetheless, the imminent arrival of new Sondheim is a furiously exciting and sadly never to be repeated experience and what a coup for Rufus Norris to score it as the centrepiece of his final season running the NT.  Directed by Joe Mantello in what has been billed as a new production likely to be different fron his original NYC one, it has a formiddable cast headed by Tracie Bennett, Rory Kinnear and Denis O’Hare. The plot follows Leo and Marianne Brink, who think they”ve dicovered the perfecrt new brunch spot – but things start to get very weird.
  • Musicals

London Road

5 out of 5 stars
This review is from London Road’s original 2011 run at the National Theatre. It will return in 2025 as part of the final season of work from outgoing NT boss Rufus Norris, who directed the show originally. Casting is TBA. With garlands of critical praise now wreathing Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork’s flower-drenched documentary musical, it’s a measure of how genuinely ground-breaking it is that ‘London Road’ remains a hard sell on paper. A journey through four years in the life of the street in Ipswich where Suffolk Strangler Steve Wright lived, the book and lyrics are derived from interviews conducted with the residents of London Road. (Verbatim is Blythe’s modus operandi – she wrote a residents’-eye view of a Hackney gunman in 2003.) Beginning with a Neighbourhood Watch meeting, ending with the second annual London Road in Bloom competition and directed with low-key sparseness by Rufus Norris, this is as far away from chorus lines and jazz hands as it gets. Three things make ‘London Road’ extraordinary. First are Cork’s verbatim songs. If you can make something with the chorus ‘Everyone is very, very nervous and unsure of everything, basically’ sound both beautiful but also true to the original sentiment – and Cork does – then that is raw humanity captured in music. Second is the outstanding ensemble: unlike previous Blythe productions, where actors parrot the recorded voices which they hear via headphones, here Cork’s manipulation of words means the cast have had to learn eve
  • West End

Nye

3 out of 5 stars
‘Nye’ will stream in cinemas as part of NT Live from April 23. The British, in case you hadn’t noticed, tend to get a little sentimental about the NHS.  So it’s understandable that playwright Tim Price and director Rufus Norris are wary of dewy-eyed hagiography when approaching ‘Nye’, a new biographical drama about Aneurin Bevan, the firebrand Labour health minister who founded the service. With the title role played by the great Michael Sheen, there is a danger of going OTT in having the nation’s favourite current Welshman star as the nation’s favourite historical Welshman. And so Norris’s production has a determinedly trippy quality intended to counter the cliches. Billed as an ‘epic Welsh fantasia’, ‘Nye’ is largely presented as the stream-of-consciousness of an older Bevan, who is a patient in one of his own hospitals. There for an ulcer operation, he drifts in and out of the present and into recollections of his past, unaware he is dying of stomach cancer – something his MP wife Jennie Lee (Sharon Small) has determinedly kept from him. Crowned by a truly uncanny wig, Sheen is a delight as the fiery but unassuming Bevan. He never at any point changes out of his red striped pyjamas, a pleasingly absurdist touch at the heart of Norris’s stylish production, in which the green hospital ward repeatedly dissolves into the past to the sound of wheezing lungs.  It’s otherworldly in places, especially the scene where Tony Jayawardena’s overbearing Churchill collars Bevan in the Co
  • Drama
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