London's National Theatre Announces Spring 2009 Lineup

London's National Theater has unveiled their upcoming list of productions, including a premiere by David Hare.

The season will include:

Mrs Affleck
A new play by Samuel Adamson, adapted from Henrik Ibsen’s Little Eyolf

After six lonely weeks with nobody but her crippled little boy for company, Rita Affleck, wealthy, beautiful and consumed by jealous love, welcomes home her husband Alfred. But, far from the passionate reunion she so craves, there is only torment as Alfred’s possessive half-sister arrives, and he announces his great revelation.

Samuel Adamson’s new play takes Ibsen’s Little Eyolf as the inspiration for a passionate and tragic tale of obsessive love, set in 1950s England.

The Pitmen Painters
by Lee Hall
inspired by a book by William Feaver

A co-production between Live Theatre, Newcastle and The National Theatre.

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.

Following sell-out seasons at Live Theatre Newcastle and in the Cottesloe, The Pitmen Painters returns, this time to the Lyttelton. Lee Hall’s new play is a humorous, deeply moving and timely look at art, class and politics.

England People Very Nice
a new play by Richard Bean

A riotous journey through four waves of immigration from the 17th century to today. As the French Huguenots, the Irish, the Jews and the Bangladeshis in turn enter the chaotic world of BethnAl Green, each new influx provokes a surge of violent protest over housing, jobs, religion and culture. And the emerging pattern shows that white flight and anxiety over integration is anything but new.

Written with scurrilous bravura, Richard Bean’s great sweep of a comedy follows a pair of star-crossed lovers amid cutters’ mobs, Papists, Jewish anarchists and radical Islamists across four tempestuous centuries.

Berlin
a reading by David Hare

For his whole adult life, David Hare has been visiting the city which so many young people regard as the most exciting in Europe. But there’s something in Berlin’s elusive character which makes him feel he’s always missing the point.

Now, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall, Hare reads a 55-minute meditation about Germany’s restored capital – both what it represents in European history, and the peculiar part it has played in his own life.

All tickets £10 (no concessions).

Macbeth
by William Shakespeare
in a version by Carl Heap

Suitable for schools and families with children aged 7 years upwards.

Following the success of last year’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Carl Heap returns to direct Macbeth for this National Theatre touring production for younger audiences.

Seven actors play multiple characters and a plethora of instruments in this engaging and inventive production, providing perhaps the best introduction for a child not only to Shakespeare, but to the transforming magic of theatre itself.

Related workshops for children and families will be available during the run.

Burnt by the Sun
by Peter Flannery
from the screenplay by
Nikita Mikhalkov and Rustam Ibragimbekov

Colonel Kotov, decorated hero of the Russian Revolution, is spending an idyllic summer in the country with his beloved young wife and family. But on one glorious sunny morning in 1936, his wife’s former lover returns from a long and unexplained absence. Amidst a tangle of sexual jealousy, retribution and remorseless political backstabbing, Kotov feels the full, horrifying reach of Stalin’s rule.

I’ll give you one chance. Go now and type your confession. I take you and the confession to Moscow tonight – two big feathers in my cap – and maybe, maybe… they’ll spare Maroussia… as the wife of a traitor. We all have a choice, Comrade.

Poised at the beginning of Stalin’s Great Terror, Burnt by the Sun shows a brutal future encroaching on the last days of a fading world.

Stovepipe
a new play by Adam Brace
A HighTide Production

When a mercenary goes missing en route to Iraq, his closest surviving friend embarks on a hunt across the post-war Middle East.

In collaboration with The National Theatre and The Bush Theatre.

Details of performance times and dates 

The venue for Stovepipe performances is: The West 12 Centre, The Broadway, Shepherds Bush, London, W12.

Stovepipe is an indoor promenade performance. Patrons are advised to wear comfortable shoes and to dress warmly.

Suitable for 14yrs+

Stovepipe premiered in the HighTide Festival 2008.

Dido, Queen of Carthage
by Christopher Marlowe

Seeking refuge from a violent storm, Aeneas lands on the shores of Carthage where Queen Dido, moved by his retelling of the fall of Troy and bewitched by a malevolent Cupid, soon burns with love. Their ensuing passion, manipulated by the watching, warring gods, can only end in tragedy.

It is Aeneas’ frown that ends my days.
If he forsake me not, I never die;
For in his looks I see eternity,
And he’ll make me immortal with a kiss.

Written when he was an undergraduate, the wit, the daring and the sheer poetry of Christopher Marlowe’s first play were so new and exciting in English theatre that Hamlet was still talking about it seventeen years later.

Death and the Kings Horseman
by Wole Soyinka

Nigeria, 1943. The King is dead, and tonight his Horseman must escort him to the Ancestors.

As Elesin Oba dances through the closing marketplace, flirting with the women, pursued by his praise-singer and an entourage of drummers, he promises to honour the ancient Yoruba custom of ritual suicide and so accompany his ruler on the final journey. But a life so rich is hard to leave, and this is a British colony where such customs are not tolerated, no matter how sacred.

Set against the conflict of indigenous and invader, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka’s extraordinary play uses Elesin’s transition from the living to the dead to examine the essence of corruption and the power of the human will.

Time and the Conways
By J B Priestley

The Conways, celebrating Kay’s 21st birthday in 1919, seem a golden family – safe and well after the Great War, looking forward to future careers, marriages, and a brave new world. Through J B Priestley’s masterly manipulation of time, we see into their future and back again to where the seeds of their downfall were planted.

Priestley was fascinated by the study of time. Writing in 1937, he saw how Britain was complacently failing to learn from history and charging headlong towards another conflagration.

The NT returns to Priestley for the first time since its ground-breaking production of An Inspector Calls.

For more information on The National Theatre including ticket sales please visit www.nationaltheatre.org.uk