Fantastic theatre and comedy you can stream at home

If you want to watch theatre at home… subscribe to National Theatre at Home. Simply stating facts, the streaming service from the UK’s flagship theatre is light years ahead of the competition. It’s slick and user-friendly, but the main point is that the shows on it are all taken from NT Live, the NT’s high quality cinema programme that takes in not just shows from the National itself, but the best of the West End also. The line-up changes regularly, but big highlights include ‘Frankenstein’ starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller, Peter Shaffer’s beloved play ‘Amadeus’ starring Lucian Msamati and lots more.

In the wake of the success of ‘Les Miserables’ and ‘The Greatest Showman’, streaming giant Netflix got a little giddy over musicals – it has a solid selection of exclusive film adaptations, such as ‘Dear Evan Hansen’, ‘Tick, Tick… Boom!’ and ‘Matilda’. Moreover, it has an absolutely vast library of contemporary live stand-up specials filmed under its auspices: lots of American superstars, inevitably, but with comics from all over the world, including plenty of Brits, including James Acaster. If you’re looking to watch a recording of a live comedy show, it’s your first port of call.

Prime hasn’t made the vast investment in modern live comedy specials that Netflix has. However, if you’re after a dose of contemporary British stand up comedy it’s well worth a look. The three series of ‘Soho Theatre Live’ are a treasure trove of quirkier, lower-key stand-up sets from (mostly) Brit comics. ‘Backstage with Katherine Ryan’ is an original show in which the Canadian standup goes backstage on the UK standup circuit. And there are also some classic specials from the likes of Stewart Lee that are well worth your time. 

That’s Shakespeare’s Globe Player to you, and it doesn’t take a genius to work out what you can watch on it. If you want access to a vast number of Shakespeare plays (plus a few others), recorded from performances at the Globe, then the theatre’s own boutique streaming service is the one for you. Clearly a certain sense of uniformity at play, but there’s a lot of diversity too: the jewels in its crown are the shows from the 2012 Globe to Globe festival, in which each of Shakespeare’s plays was performed by a different company from around the world. 

The name hints at the possibility you’re getting the best of contemporary Broadway; in fact this odds and sods player draws on a pretty random archive that’s actually heavily based around British productions. However, there’s a lot of very good stuff on there, from the Donmar’s recent all-female Shakespeare trilogy to the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’.