The Fifties? They were terrible: bone-cold houses where people huddled round the fireplace for heat, empty Sundays that lasted a month, drawn-out rationing, bread you could build houses with.
When it was announced that Cate Blanchett was making her National Theatre debut with Martin's Crimp's new play, When We have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, its website exploded with people wishing to buy tickets. To those many thousands disappointed, I say: “Well done, you!”
Will pride of place amongst theatre productions every year go in perpetuity to the work of Stephen Sondheim?
The Tell-Tale Heart may be the title of an 1843 short story by Edgar Allen Poe, but rest assured that Anthony Neilson's adaptation of it for the National contains this theatre maverick's signature throughout.
One emotional high point in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the much-lauded Simon Stephens adaptation that is back in our midst once more, comes when the teenage Christopher Boone is floated in the air as part of his dream of being an astronaut.
This is Natasha Gordon’s first play, and in it she has created an entire world. A world of grief and laughter, conflict and closeness. A world that is very specifically located within Britain's Jamaican community, yet one whose themes of loss and belonging cross boundaries.
The road to full musical theatre production has been a long one for Hadestown. It began back in 2006, with Anaïs Mitchell’s song cycle – a folk/jazz take on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth – toured around Vermont in a school bus, then grew into an ecstatically received concept album in 2010, and has gone through further development with director Rachel Chavkin in Off-Broadway and Canadian stagings.
War Horse at the National Theatre on Sunday’s Armistice Day centenary: there were medalled veterans and at least one priest in the rows in front, dark suits and poppies all around, and scarcely a youngster in sight. When the bells rang out in a closing scene, the tolling was extended, and the veterans in the audience stood.
Dramatic Exchanges is a dazzling array of correspondence, stretching over more than a century, between National Theatre people.
In 2017, playwright Nina Raine's Consent, an excellent National Theatre play about lawyers and rape victims, was hugely successful, winning a West End transfer, as well as generating a lot of discussion about gender politics.