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National Theatre

The world's greatest theatre?

Theatre | Public and national theatres
South Bank
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Thursday 10 October 2024

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Written by Anya Ryan

Contributing writer, Time Out London

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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

Summerfolk

Maxim Gorky’s Summerfolk is the sort of esoteric classic that only gets staged very occasionally: I think this NT revival is the third UK production ever, and the first this century. It’s not hard to see either the reason for its reputation or its infrequent staging. Concerning a group of dissolute nouveau-riche Russians spending a frivolous summer arguing among themselves as societal storm clouds gather, it is pretty damn Chekhovian. On the other hand its enormous cast and prodigious uncut running time mean it’s well beyond the means of most theatres to put on: it has only ever been staged here by the NT and RSC. This new adaptation by Nina and Moses Raine is a full hour shorter than its previous National Theatre outing in 1999. It’s still overwhelming at first: it feels like you’ve been plunged into a sprawling existential soap opera, teeming with characters and plot lines that have been running for years that you’re having to familiarise yourself with on the fly. Gradually, though, Robert Hastie’s revival does take shape thanks to some delicious luxury casting. Foremost is Sophie Rundle as the gorgeous, disaffected Varvara, who rails with mounting fury against… everything basically. The rootless insubstantiality of her peers; the annoying men who insist on adoring her; her awful husband Sergei, very entertainingly played as a gravelly voiced boor by Paul Ready. The pleasures are pretty soapy throughout: essentially three hours of compulsive people watching. The 22...

Drama
Until 29 Apr 2026

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

Les Liaisons Dangereuses – I think it’s French for ‘the sexy meetings’ – is a classic play, though I’m not convinced that’s the same as being a good one. Starting life in 1782 as an epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Christopher Hampton’s 1985 stage adaptation was a sensation, adapted into a hit 1988 film and clearly responsible for the ‘90s teen remake Cruel Intentions. It was always trashy, mind, and in a post-#MeToo world I’d say there are some hard questions to be asked about its titillating realpolitik. Accepting all that, this is a pretty good production of it, as you’d expect from the great Marianne Elliott’s first show at the NT in over a decade, with a to die for cast headed by Lesley Manville and Aiden Turner. The duo play callous, capricious, above all very sexy French toffs Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil and Vicomte Sébastien de Valmont, ex-lovers whose relationship has degenerated into callous game playing. Manville is of course an absurdly good actor, one of the all time greats, and Turner is not bloody bad either. In the sexy, sinister, mirror-filled world conjured by Rosanna Vize’s set and Tom Jackson Greaves’ whirling choreography – filled with silent, glowering courtiers who dance with menacing elegance – the two leads are the main attraction and rightly so. The play has issues but by god do they work it, and not necessarily in the ways you’d expect. Manville’s Merteuil is sexy but not overtly sensuous. Rather, she is cerebral, an expert...

Drama
Until 6 Jun 2026

The Authenticator

Winsome Pinnock’s eccentric and occasionally confounding new play follows Abi (Rakie Ayola) and Marva (Cherrelle Skeete), two Black female historians who have secured access to the recently unearthed daily records of an eighteenth century Jamaican plantation. It belonged to Henry Harford, an ancestor of Fenella (Sylvestra le Touzel), an eccentric older lady who now lives in a splendid country pile built by the gargantuan sums Henry was paid as compensation for Britain’s abolition of slavery. One might well expect the exuberantly free spirited Marva and her more reserved, more prickly mentor Abi to come into conflict with Fenella (aka Fen) over the latter’s handwringing over the connection between her family wealth and the trade. Actually it all gets a lot more complicated than that. Pinnock is deeply interested in the extent to which one’s ancestry constitutes one’s identity. This is of course most obviously made manifest in Fen – she cannot escape the spectre of Henry without physically abandoning the wealth she inherited from him. But then again, Pinnock makes the point that as individuals, Black Britons are not monolithic in their historical relationship to slavery. Abi has written about how she’s from slave-owning Nigerian nobility (who admittedly treated their slaves better than the British did); Marva, meanwhile, is descended from enslaved Ghanaians who were shipped out to the West Indies. But how ‘real’ is the past? What if the facts about your past abruptly...

Drama
Until 9 May 2026

War Horse

This review is from 2012 and War Horse's last West End run. The National Theatre's 'War Horse' has become ubiquitous. The toast of the West End and Broadway, as I write this it's sold out at the New London Theatre for the next two months – by contrast, you can book to see 'Matilda' next week. Its enormous success has negated the impact of Arts Council funding cuts on the NT, to the extent that the show has started to be singled out by some commentators as an example of 'safe' post-credit crunch programming. And, of course, there's the Steven Spielberg film, a curious affair sparked by the director's genuine love of the play, in which he gives Michael Morpurgo's 1982 a lavish screen treatment that has everything bar the one thing that made the play so special in the first place. That is, of course, Handspring's astonishing life-size puppets. Skeletally modernist in form but utterly, magically alive thanks to their talented army of puppeteers and Toby Sedgwick's phenomenal choreography, they are the true stars of Tom Morris and Marianne Elliott's production. Without them, Morpurgo's tale of how Devon-dwelling teen Albert Narracott signed up to throw himself into the meat grinder of World War I – in order to track down his beloved horse Joey – would be a likeable, humane, slightly formulaic introduction to the catastrophe of the war. With them, it is something different entirely, a virtuoso spectacle that combines grit and charm in equal measure. Joey is a multifaceted...

West End
16 May30 Jul 2026

Pride

A stated part of Indhu Rubasingham’s plan as the new artistic director of the National Theatre is to shake up the smaller Dorfman a little. It had settled into pretty much a straight up new writing house, but her initial programming includes not only revivals and a Punchdrunk show, but also a commnitment to starting new musicals out on the NT’s smaller stages, not its biggest ones. Here’s the first fruit of that policy, as Matthew Warchus directs Stephen Beresford’s adaptation of their own acclaimed 2014 film. Based on a true story and real characters, Pride tells the story of the solidarity the British LGBT community offered the striking miners in the ’80s, with the story revolving around yoiung gay activist Mark Ashton, who brokered the unlikely alliance. Jhon Lumbden plays Mark, in an ensemble that also includes Samuel Barnett and Chris Jenkins. We’ve no real idea what to expect musically: Beresford will handle the lyrics, with the actual tunes penned by Christopher Nightingale, Josh Cohen and DJ Walde.

Musicals
11 Jun12 Sept 2026

The Misanthrope

Hollywood star Sandra Oh is a very good get indeed for the National Theatre, as she takes on the title role in NT boss Indhu Rubasingham’s revival of Moliére’s timeless comedy The Misanthrope. The adaptation is by the veteran playwright Martin Crimp, in a latest iteration of a version that first debuted in 1996. Previously the title charcter was Alceste, a male playwright who alienates himself from wider society after he starts to tell the truth about how corrupt and venal it all is – Damian Lewis took it on in the 2009 revival, opposite Kiera Knightley as rising starlet Jennifer. All we really know about Crimp’s latest update is that Oh will here play a novelist named Alice, with Paul Chahidi and Abigail Cruttenden co-starring opposite the Killing Eve star.

Comedy
16 Jun1 Aug 2026

The Story

Clint Dyer may no longer be National Theatre deputy artistic director, but he remains front and centre of its 2026 programming as he helms a widescreen Olivier Theatre UK premiere of Tracey Scott Wilson's 2003 play. Based on a series of real-life stories, it follows four journalists as they frantical scrabble to land the story of a white teacher murdered in a Black neighbourhood. Letitia Wright of Black Panther fame is the big name in the cast – other members include Ashley Thomas, Lorraine Toussaint and Wilf Scolding.

Drama
27 Aug24 Oct 2026

The Jungle Book

Although the National Theatre will be running shows in all three theatres over the Christmas hols, The Jungle Book is emphatically its Big Christmas Show. A lavish family friendly adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s India-set story cycle, it’s adapted by Indian playwright Anupama Chandrasekhar (of the excellent The Father and the Assassin fame), and emphatically not a stage version of the beloved Disney film. Specifically, we know that the action is being relocated to the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans in the country’s east. But one would imagine Chandrasekhar’s spin will be distinctly postcolonial, and while Disney’s plot was cobbled together from selected bits of Kipling’s collection of stories, the playwright may opt for others. Still, don’t imagine it’ll be radically different: it’ll focus on Mowgli the Man-Cub – played by NT stalwart Hiran Abeysekera – and feature spectacular puppet renderings of his various animal friends and enemies. NT boss Indhu Rubasingham will direct, with puppets by Finn Caldwell and Nick Barnes.

Drama
13 Nov 20266 Feb 2027