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Dateline: 16th January, 2008
2008 at the National Nicholas Hytner has announced the National Theatre's programme for 2008 and beyond. Introducing the programme, he said, "2008 will be the most ambitious year since I became the National's director. It will be marked above all by the extraordinary confidence of British playwriting, which is in evidence all over the country, at theatres large and small. We have four new plays from the current great generation of major English playwrights, and eight from their successors. Many of them are on an epic scale, and they share the repertoire with an unprecedented profusion of classics, devised shows, physical theatre and dance theatre. The National is only part of a surge of creative energy throughout the British theatre and I'm looking forward to seeing the results on our stages." In the OlivierNicholas Hytner's production of George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara, with Hayley Atwell, Clare Higgins, Paul Ready and Simon Russell Beale leading the cast, opens on 4th March, part of te Travelex £10 season Fram, a new play by Tony Harrison about the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, will open on 17th April. Directed by Tony Harrison and Bob Crowley; the cast will include Jasper Britton and Sian Thomas. It will also be part of the Travelex £10 season. The Travelex £10 season continues in June with Thomas Middleton's Elizabethan play The Revemger's Tragedy, directed by Melly Still, with Rory Kinnear as Vindice. A new play by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, Her Naked Skin, set against the backdrop of the Suffragette movement, will be directed by Howard Davies; also part of the Travelex season, it opens in July. Tom Stoppard and André Previn's Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, will be revived in August in the Olivier as part of the Travelex season. This will be a co-production between Southbank Sinfonia and the National Theatre. Jonathan Kent will direct Ralph Fiennes in the title role of Oedipus by Sophocles, in a new version by Frank McGuinness, opening in October. War Horse will return to the Olivier in November 2008, following its initial hugely acclaimed, sell-out run. Based on Michael Morpurgo's novel and adapted by Nick Stafford, the production is directed by Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris. In the LytteltonJames Macdonald's production of The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, Peter Handke's play without words, opens on 13th February. Never So Good, a new play by Howard Brenton about Harold Macmillan (Conservative politician and Prime Minister 1957-1963) will be directed by Howard Davies, opening on 19th March; Jeremy Irons makes his NT debut as Macmillan. David Hare directs Vanessa Redgrave in The Year of Magical Thinking, a play by Joan Didion based on her memoir, opening on 30th April. The production (first seen on Broadway in 2007) will also tour the UK and internationally. A new play by Michael Frayn, Afterlife, exploring the life of the Austrian impresario and founder of the Salzburg Festival Max Reinhardt, will open in June, directed by Michael Blakemore. A Slight Ache by Harold Pinter will be produced for a run of early evening performances in the summer, with Simon Russell Beale leading the cast. A new work co-directed and performed by Akram Khan and Juliette Binoche and designed by Anish Kapoor will premiere in September, co-produced by the National. DV8 return with a new work directed by Lloyd Newson, To Be Straight With You, visiting the Lyttelton in October after a UK and international tour. In the CottesloeAs previously announced, with Lucinda Coxon's new play Happy Now?, directed by Thea Sharrock, opens on 24th January; Olivia Williams leads the cast. Following the success of Burn, Chatroom and Citizenship, another triple bill of new plays for teenagers (originally commissioned for the Connections programme), will be directed by Paul Miller: Baby Girl by Roy Williams, DNA by Dennis Kelly and The Miracle by Lin Coghlan, opening on 28 February. Marianne Elliott directs Harper Regan, a new play by Simon Stephens, with Lesley Sharp playing the title role, opening in April. The National Theatre joins in with The Gate Theatre, Out of Joint, Paines Plough and The Royal Court to present Mark Ravenhill's cycle of seventeen plays Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat in various venues around London; four of the plays will be presented in the Lyttelton and Cottesloe Theatres in April. Lee Hall's new play, The Pitman Painters, transfers from Live Theatre, Newcastle (where it premiered to critical acclaim in September) for a limited run, with the original cast directed by Max Roberts. Katie Mitchell will create a production based on Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, with a company including Ben Whishaw, in July. Her highly praised production Waves, based on Virginia Woolf's novel, will return to the Cottesloe in August for a limited run, prior to a UK and international tour. In November, Marianne Elliott returns to direct Mrs Affleck by Samuel Adamson, from Ibsen's Little Eyolf. In 2009Gethsemane, a new play by David Hare, will open early in the year, directed by Howard Davies. As already reported on the BTG, Deborah Warner will direct Fiona Shaw in the title role of Brecht's Mother Courage. On TourThe Year pof Magical Thinking, with Vanessa Redgrave, will tour during and after its run at the Lyttelton, both internationally and in the UK, including visits to Bath and Cheltenham, the Salzburg and Dublin Festivals, and Delphi. Waves will visit Leeds, Salford, Bath, The Hague, Luxembourg, Athens and New York's Duke Theatre under the auspices of the Lincoln Center. Ayub Khan-Din's Rafta, Rafta… visits Birmingham, Salford, Milton Keynes and Bradford between January and March. Deborah Warner's production of Happy Days, with Fiona Shaw as Winnie, is currently visiting BAM in New York for a month-long run; it will visit the Holland Festival in late May and will make a return visit to Epidaurus in July. Conor McPherson's The Seafarer continues its run on Broadway.
Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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