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The National Theatre
The Olivier, Cottesloe
and Lyttelton Theatres
South Bank
London SE1 9PX
Box office: +44 020 7452 300
Updated
10 April 2008
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Major
Barbara
by Bernard Shaw
April 18 - July 3 2008
Major Barbara works
tirelessly for the poor at a Salvation
Army shelter until a large but morally
dubious donation is welcomed from her
estranged father, a millionaire weapons
manufacturer. But when she visits the
factory itself, the well-fed workers
in their thriving model town make a
devastating case for arms trade profits
and a whole new set of ideals.
Fram
by Tony Harrison
April 10 - May 22 2008
This epic sweep of a
play takes us from a contemporary Westminster
Abbey to the Arctic ship Fram -
or Forward - specially built by
the famous Norwegian explorer Fridtjof
Nansen who, with his suicidal companion,
Johansen, makes a bid on foot for the
North Pole in the 1890s. Though incompatible,
they share a bear fur sleeping-bag through
the long winter. Nansen, still haunted
by Johansen's ghost, is appointed
to the League of Nations. As a figurehead
of Russian famine relief in 1922, he
conducts the first celebrity campaign,
searching for means, however shocking,
to make people care.
Never
So Good
by Howard Brenton
April 14 - August 14 2008
Set against a back-drop
of fading Empire, war, the Suez crisis,
vintage champagne, adultery and vicious
Tory politics at the Ritz, Howard Brenton's
Never So Good paints the portrait of
a brilliant, witty but complex man,
at times comically and, in the end,
tragically out of kilter with his times.
Harper
Regan
by Simon Stephens
April 16 - August 9 2008
On a startlingly bright
Autumn night in 2006 Harper Regan walked
away from her home and her husband and
her daughter and she kept walking. She
told nobody that she was going. She
told nobody where she was going. She
put everything she ever built at risk.
For two lost days and nights, until
it looked as though her entire life
might unravel, she didn't turn
back.
Happy
Now?
by Lucinda Coxon
April 25 - May 10 2008
A chance encounter at
a conference hotel plays upon Kitty's
mind as she struggles to balance personal
freedom with family life, fidelity and
a testing job. Her husband seems more
interested in misplaced apostrophes
than his marriage, her parents are looking
down the barrel of oblivion and, although
she might toy with joining a gym, Kitty's
running out of time for big changes.
The
Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion
April 25 - July 15 2008
The Year of Magical
Thinking, adapted for the stage by Joan
Didion from her best-selling memoir
of the same name, chronicles the aftermath
of her husband's sudden death.
The
Pitmen Painters
by Lee Hall
April 19 - July 25 2008
In 1934, a group of
Ashington miners hired a professor to
teach an art appreciation evening class.
Rapidly abandoning theory in favour
of practice, the pitmen began to paint.
Within a few years the most avant-garde
artists became their friends and their
work was acquired by prestigious collections;
but every day they worked, as
before, down the mine.
The
Revenger's Tragedy
by Thomas Middleton
May 27 - August 7 2008
As he holds the skull
of his beloved - who rejected
the licentious old Duke's advances
and so was poisoned - Vindice
plots the Duke's grotesque murder.
But in a court where adultery, rape
and incest are the norm, his vengeance
does not stop there. An orgy of ritualistic,
even playful, bloodletting follows.
Afterlife
by Michael Frayn
June 3 - August 16 2008
Max Reinhardt, one of
the greatest impresarios of theatrical
history, had a lifelong ambition -
to dissolve the boundary between theatre
and the world it portrays. Each year
at the Salzburg festival he directed
a famous morality play, Everyman, about
God sending Death to summon a representative
of mankind for judgment. The victim
he chooses is a man who, like Reinhardt,
rejoices in his wealth and all the pleasures
that money can buy.
De
Profundis
by Oscar Wilde
June 16 - July 2 2008
During his sentence
in Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde wrote a
letter to his lover, agonising over
the lack of contact. It is perhaps the
greatest love letter ever written, filled
with a torrent of accusation, passion
and eventually reconciliation.
A
Slight Ache
by Harold Pinter
July 21 - August 13 2008
A
Slight Ache takes an oblique
view of a long-married couple, the irascible
Edward and his frustrated wife Flora,
when the arrival of a statuesque silent
stranger splinters their loveless bourgeois
marriage. Simon Russell Beale and Clare
Higgins play the couple in this early
work by Harold Pinter.
Her
Naked Skin
by Rebecca Lenkiewicz
july 24 - August 9 2008
London 1913. Militancy
in the Suffragette Movement is at its
height. Thousands of women of all classes
serve time in Holloway Prison in their
fight to gain the vote. Amongst them
is Lady Celia Cain who feels trapped
by both the policies of the day and
the shackles of a frustrating marriage.
Inside, she meets a young seamstress,
Eve Douglas, and her life spirals into
an erotic but dangerous chaos.
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