Series: Modern Plays

Good evening. I’m Inspector Carter. Take my case. This must be Charles Haversham! I’m sorry, this must’ve given you all a damn shock. After benefitting from a large and sudden inheritance, the inept and accident-prone Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society embark on producing an ambitious 1920s murder mystery. They are delighted that neither casting issues nor technical hitches currently stand in...

My name is Christopher John Francis Boone. I know all the countries of the world and the capital cities. And every prime number up to 7507. Christopher, fifteen years old, stands beside Mrs Shears's dead dog. It has been speared with a garden fork, it is seven minutes after midnight, and Christopher is under suspicion. He records each fact in...

"Another state-of-the-nation masterpiece from James Graham" - The Telegraph One life has been wasted, because of this. Senseless, no reason at all. So where’s the sense in wasting another? If we can ‘help’ him? Jacob Dunne, a teenager from Nottingham, spends his Saturday nights seeking thrills with his friends. One fateful evening, an impulsive punch leads to fatal consequences. After...

Winner of the Noel Coward Award for Best Entertainment or Comedy at the 2020 Olivier Awards In 1611, Emilia Bassano wrote a volume of radical, feminist, and subversive poetry. It was one of the first published collections of poetry written by a woman in England. The little we know of Emilia Bassano is restricted to the possibility that she may...

An industrial port of a war-torn city. Women survivors wait to be shipped abroad. Officials come and go. A grandmother, once Queen, watches as her remaining family are taken from her one by one. The city burns around them. The Women of Troy, Euripides' great anti-war tragedy, is published in Don Taylor's translation to coincide with the National Theatre's production...

New York, summer 1954Criminal Courts BuildingA man is deadThe life of another is at stakeA "guilty" verdict seems a foregone conclusion. But one member of the jury has the will to probe more deeply into the evidence and the courage to confront the ignorance and the prejudice of some of his fellow jurors. The conflict which follows is fierce and...

Mother Courage and Her Children was first performed in Zurich in 1941 and is usually seen as Brecht's greatest work. Remaining a powerful indictment of war and social injustice, it is an epic drama set in the seventeenth century during the Thirty Years' War. The plot follows the resilient Mother Courage, who survives by running a commissary business that profits...

An Experiment with an Air Pump is Shelagh Stephenson's daring and thoughtful new play. 1799 - On the eve of a new century, the house buzzes with scientific experiments, furtive romance, and farcical amateur dramatics. 1999 - In a world of scientific chaos, cloning, and genetic engineering, the cellar of the same house reveals a dark secret buried for 200...

Romantic Meg. Shy Beth. Wilful Amy. And, of course, passionate and fiery Jo. Little Women tells the story of the March sisters growing up in genteel poverty against the backdrop of the American Civil War. This timeless tale of four sisters' adventures has enchanted millions of readers, and is now available in this acclaimed adaptation for the stage.

She’s like no one I’ve ever met... She’s like fire and water all at once. Warwickshire, 1582. Agnes Hathaway, a natural healer, meets the Latin tutor, William Shakespeare. Drawn together by powerful but hidden impulses, they create a life together and make a family. As William moves to London to discover his place in the world of theatre, Agnes stays...

A group of teenagers do something bad, really bad, then panic and cover the whole thing up. But when they find that the cover-up unites them and brings harmony to their otherwise fractious lives, where’s the incentive to put things right? DNA is a poignant and, sometimes, hilarious tale with a very dark heart. A contemporary play for younger people,...

When this adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s classic children’s story opened at the RSC Stratford in November 1998, it received rave reviews and broke box office records. Four children are evacuated from London during the Blitz. While exploring the Professor’s house, they stumble across the gateway to another world, and the adventure begins. The land of Narnia is under the...

Winner of Best Revival at the Olivier Awards 2024Winner of Best Play Revival at the WhatsOnStage Awards 2024 Can you imagine if it was possible to completely change the way you live your life? To look at your life and ask yourself what you would do if it died. If your old life died. It ended. And then take what’s...

April, 1984. Winston Smith thinks a thought, starts a diary, and falls in love. But Big Brother is watching him, and the door to Room 101 can swing open in the blink of an eye. Its ideas have become our ideas, and Orwell’s fiction is often said to be our reality. The definitive book of the 20th century is re-examined...

This version of Brecht's great anti-war play by playwright David Hare was premiered by the National Theatre, London, in November 1995. It adopts a freer approach to the text than many editions, adapting the original rather than offering a close translation. In this chronicle of the Thirty Years War, Mother Courage follows the armies back and forth across Europe, selling...

Fired from his skiffle band, Francis Henshall becomes minder to Roscoe Crabbe, a small-time East End hood, now in Brighton to collect £6,000 from his fiancée’s dad. But Roscoe is really his sister Rachel posing as her own dead brother, who’s been killed by her boyfriend Stanley Stubbers. Holed up at The Cricketers’ Arms, the permanently ravenous Francis spots the...

"I looked around the room and I thought, I'm the only person in this room that hasn't killed anyone." Talking to Terrorists is a play commissioned by the Royal Court and Out of Joint. The writer, director Max Stafford-Clark, and actors interviewed people from around the world who have been involved in terrorism. They wanted to know what makes ordinary...

Nominated for Best New Play at the Critics' Circle Theatre Awards 2026 The point is to divest yourself of shame. Anything that'll make you pick up a drink in the future. It's about getting clean. After many years in the 12-step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous, James agrees to become the sponsor of newcomer Luka. On the journey to sobriety, the...

Described by Brecht as 'a gangster play that would recall certain events familiar to us all', Arturo Ui is a witty and savage satire of the rise of Hitler. Brecht recasts it into a fictional, small-time Chicago gangster's takeover of the city's greengrocery trade in the 1930s. The satirical allegory combines Brecht's Epic style of theatre with black comedy and...

Winner of the 2020 Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Affiliate Theatre I looked at her, wanting her to laugh. Wanting her to share in the joke. But she didn’t. She just stared. I knew then, in that moment – that she had taken it literally... Edinburgh Comedy Award winner Richard Gadd has a chilling story to tell about obsession,...

Glengarry Glen Ross explores a world of lies, greed, and corruption—it’s business as usual. Set in an office of cut-throat Chicago salesmen, four increasingly desperate employees will do anything, legal or otherwise, to sell the most real estate. Pitched in a high-stakes competition against each other, as time and luck start to run out, the mantra is simple: close the...

Freedom has only ever meant Love. And life lived without love Is not life enough. Chess is in prison. Facing a lengthy sentence, her cell mate, Serena, becomes her soul mate. But when Serena is given parole, Chess faces total isolation. Hope comes in the form of a music producer looking for a reason to love music again. She finds...

World premiere of a new version of Euripides’ classic Medea. Plays in London as part of the Almeida’s Greek Season. Medea’s marriage is breaking up. And so is everything else. Testing the limits of revenge and liberty, Euripides’ seminal play cuts to the heart of gender politics and asks what it means to be a woman and a wife. One...

Mnemonic is about memory, people's personal histories, shared memories, and discordant recollections—exhuming the past in order to examine it in the present. A variety of stories—from the discovery of bog people like Tollund Man to people's compulsion to retrace the origins of their ancestors—collide and form a piece of theatre which questions our concept of time, our capacity to distort...

Winner of the 2023 Olivier Award for Best Entertainment or Comedy Play. Joe Hisaishi and Royal Shakespeare Company present Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbour Totoro. My Neighbour Totoro is a captivating coming-of-age tale that celebrates the wondrous magic of childhood and the transformative power of imagination. Two sisters, Satsuki and Mei, embark on the summer of their lives in the idyllic...

A brilliant new one-man show starring Pete Postlethwaite It's 11pm on Millennium Eve. The ancient clown, Scaramouche Jones, has given his last performance and retires to his dressing room to wait alone for the stroke of midnight - and his own centenary. Reflecting on the extraordinary fortunes of his life, his journey spans the furthest reaches of crumbling empires and...

The orchard’s white, all white. You haven’t forgotten, have you, Lyuba? The avenue lined with trees, unfurling like a slender ribbon. And on moonlit nights, it shimmers. You remember, don’t you? You haven’t forgotten? Can anyone persuade Ranevskaya and her aristocratic household that the world is changing, and they must too? Following internationally acclaimed productions of The Seagull (Belvoir St...

Good evening, I’m Inspector Carter. Take my case. This must be Charles Haversham! I’m sorry, this must’ve given you all a damn shock… The original version of the global hit play created by Mischief. After benefiting from a large and sudden inheritance, the inept and accident-prone Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society embark on producing an ambitious 1920s murder mystery. Hilarious disaster...

All the world’s a stage. Have you ever been trapped in a bad relationship, playing a role that doesn’t suit you? Jen and Sam are also trapped … in a multiverse of Shakespeare’s complete works. On their quest to discover the doorway back to reality, they notice something unusual about Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy. Now Jen and Sam must decide: do...

Here's some advice: Don't ever underestimate Arturo. You'll be found out and stopped, eventually, Just like I stopped this fuckin' treachery And better late than never. Now ya see What happens when ya fuck with me, ya lousy Rat-fuck bastards? Chicago. A city of jazz and gangsters, prohibition and poverty. Amongst the murk of the Great Depression, there’s room for...

Along with Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya is credited as one of Chekhov's masterpieces and a significant precursor of modern drama. Set on a country estate in late nineteenth century Russia, Uncle Vanya is in part a study of the enervation of Russian middle-class provincial life. The major dynamics between the characters themselves are centred on two...

I’m making a decision. I’m changing things. This is it. Three old friends in their mid-twenties. One remarkable day. For Ted, Danny, and Charlotte, it’s time to seize control. Make a difference. Change things. This is it. A day trip through the parks and raves and cafés of South London, where life is what you make it. The rapid-fire words...

When her dead brother is decreed a traitor, his body left unburied beyond the city walls, Antigone refuses to accept this most severe of punishments. Defying her uncle who governs, she dares to say ‘No’. Forging ahead with a funeral alone, she places personal allegiance before politics, a tenacious act that will trigger a cycle of destruction. Renowned for the...

In 1995 Sarah Kane's first full-length play, Blasted, opened. It became the cause célèbre of the theatrical year, making front-page headlines and outraging critics with its depiction of rape, torture and violence in civil war. "Sheer unadulterated brutalism" - Evening Standard

Winner of Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play 2023Winner of Best New Play at the Olivier Awards 2024 It’s time to change the game. The country that gave the world football has since delivered a painful pattern of loss. Why can’t England’s men win at their own game? The team has the worst track record for penalties in the...

Nominated for Best New Entertainment or Comedy Play at the Olivier Awards 2026 If you live a long life and get to the end of it without ever once feeling crushingly depressed, then you probably weren’t paying attention. You’re seven years old. Mum’s in hospital. Dad says she’s ‘done something stupid’. She finds it hard to be happy. You start...

Described by Brecht as 'a gangster play that would recall certain events familiar to us all', The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is a witty and savage satire of the rise of Hitler – recast by Brecht into a small-time Chicago gangster's takeover of the city's greengrocery trade. Using a wide range of parody and pastiche – from Al Capone...

4.48 Psychosis was written throughout the autumn and winter of 1998-99 as Kane battled with one of her recurrent bouts of depression. On February 20, 1999, aged 28, the playwright committed suicide. On the page, the piece looks like a poem. No characters are named, and even their number is unspecified. It could be a journey through one person's mind,...

Nominated for Best New Play at the Critics' Circle Theatre Awards 2026Nominated for Best Play at the London Standard Theatre Awards 2026 Adventure and Truth. Sacrifice everything for it. It is worth it. He is a motherless child. A bullied schoolboy. An adventurer scaling mountains. A coloniser of land, of people. Brother. Father. Soldier. Cult leader. He is sipping champagne...

Look it’s two-two tweets that helped me vent my frustrations. It’s really not that deep… Holed up in her bedroom, Cleo’s aired twenty-two Whatsapps from Kara and has cut off contact with the rest of the world. It doesn’t mean she’s been silent though – she’s got a lot to say. On the internet, actions don’t always speak louder than...

I can do it. I can be her. Hedda Gabler. When offered the lead part in a Norwegian film adaptation of Hedda Gabler, an American actress seizes the opportunity to escape Hollywood and gain some artistic credibility. She’s running away from her past as a child star, from her present as a tabloid punchline, and from an unfortunate collision between...

We need the theatre, couldn’t, couldn’t do without it. Could we? A successful actress visits her brother’s isolated estate far from the city, throwing the frustrated residents' unfulfilled ambitions into sharp relief. As her son attempts to impress with a self-penned play, putting much more than his pride at stake, others dream of fame, love, and the ability to change...

"Well we’ve got three floors right. Plenty of room… Room for a children’s bedroom. Room for two." London, the present day. A woman is driven to the unthinkable by her desperate desire to have a child. Written and directed by Simon Stone, this radical new version of Lorca’s tragedy of yearning and loss won universal critical acclaim when it premiered...

No master to serve, no leash to bear. I walk as I please, and I speak as I dare.Poet, soldier and philosopher. Cyrano de Bergerac burns with brilliance. He's fiercely funny and intensely romantic – but behind the veil of wit is one large problem: his nose.Haunted by doubts and too proud to beg, he watches from the shadows as...

What is gonna happen, when we can’t take it anymore? Stumbling down the street drunk at 11.30am, Effie is the kind of girl you avoid making eye contact with. You think you know her, but maybe you don’t know half of it. Effie’s life is a mess of drink, drugs, and drama every night, and a hangover worse than death...

Adapted for the stage by the author, Takin' Over the Asylum is a hilarious, updated, and profoundly moving adaptation of Donna Franceschild's Bafta-winning BBC TV-series. Set in a Scottish mental institution, the play reveals hope and joy in the fragile beauty of the human heart. When Ready Eddie McKenna, Soul Survivor and double glazing salesman, arrives to reinvigorate St Jude’s...

A morality masterpiece, The Caucasian Chalk Circle powerfully demonstrates Brecht's pioneering theatrical techniques. This version by Frank McGuinness was published to coincide with the National Theatre's production which toured the UK in 2007. A servant girl sacrifices everything to protect a child abandoned in the heat of civil war. Order restored, she is made to confront the boy's biological mother...

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot is a hilarious and extraordinary courtroom drama where history's most infamous betrayal is dissected by the forces of good and evil. Published to coincide with the European premiere at the Almeida Theatre, London, from 29 March - 10 May 2008, this is the third play by Guirgis on the Methuen Drama list. It follows...

1984 War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. Winston Smith rewrites history for the Ministry of Truth, but when he’s handed a note that says simply ‘I love you’ by a woman he hardly knows, he decides to risk everything in a search for the real truth. In a world where cheap entertainment keeps the proles ignorant but...

This ain’t no classic play. The Bacchae aren’t standing on the sidelines whilst the men have all the fun. These fangirls may be a pack but they’re not animals… They are stage-storming powerhouses ready to cause chaos in Thebes. Whilst the Bacchae maraud in the mountains, their god Dionysos is taking part in his own f*cked-up family Olympics. He’s here...

Winner of the 2022 Critics' Circle Award for Best New Play Nominated for the 2022 Olivier Award for Best New Play “A man should never turn down two things. Sex, and appearing on television.” 1968 – a year of protest that divided America. As two men fight to become the next President, all eyes are on the battle between two...

When an old adversary threatens Rome, the city calls once more on her hero and defender: Coriolanus. But famine threatens the city, the citizens’ hunger swells to an appetite for change, and on returning from the field, Coriolanus must confront the march of realpolitik and the voice of an angry people. This is one of Shakespeare’s last tragedies, best known...

Set in an unnamed city from which voices and images spring, Crave charts the disintegration of a human mind under the pressures of love, loss and desire. "A hugely unnerving theatrical experience, shot through with the language of the Bible and a genuinely poetic richness" (Time Out) "A dramatic poem in the late-Beckett style, sometimes a chamber quartet for lost...

Bryony Kimmings creates multi-platform art works which aim to provoke change. Through script and photographs, this book documents the show I'm a Phoenix, Bitch, Kimmings' personal response to the trauma of having post-natal breakdown. In 2016, Bryony nearly drowned. Postnatal breakdowns, an imploding relationship, and an extremely sick child left her sitting beneath the waves hoping she could slowly turn...

National Theatre Connections is an annual festival which brings new plays for young people to schools and youth theatres across the UK and Ireland. Commissioning exciting work from leading playwrights, the festival exposes actors aged 13-19 to the world of professional theatre-making, giving them full control of a theatrical production - from costume and set design to stage management and...

It is the scale and range of creative collaboration inherent in theatre that sits at the very heart of National Theatre Connections. Drawing together the work of ten leading playwrights, National Theatre Connections 2021 features work by brilliant artists. These are plays for a generation of theatre-makers who want to ask questions, challenge assertions and test the boundaries, and for...

2025 Revised and Updated Edition One man’s dream of the NHS. From campaigning at the coalfield to leading the battle to create the NHS, Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan is often referred to as the politician with the greatest influence on our country without ever being Prime Minister. Confronted with death, Nye’s deepest memories lead him on a mind-bending journey back through...

Coward's wit and precision as a modern dramatist is nowhere better exemplified than in this classic modern play from 1930. Private Lives tells the story of Elyot Chase and Amanda Prynne (originally played by Gertrude Lawrence and Noël Coward), who were recently divorced from one another five years previously. They arrive coincidentally at the same French hotel, honeymooning with their...

“I did not kill my father, but sometimes I felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared with what followed. I am only including the little story of his death to explain how my sisters and I came to...

Winner of Best New Play at the WhatsOnStage Awards 2026Nominated for Best New Entertainment or Comedy Play at the Olivier Awards 2026 LAUGHTER IS THEIR ONLY WEAPON Brace yourself for hilarious mayhem and a not-so-secret mission with Mischief’s newest action-packed adventure, The Comedy About Spies. When a rogue British agent pilfers plans for a top-secret weapon, CIA and KGB spies...

First, do no harm. How do we defend the "truth" when no one agrees what it is and many have reason to undermine it? Very freely adapting Professor Bernhardi by Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Icke's gripping moral thriller uses the lens of medical ethics to examine urgent questions of faith, belief, and scientific rationality. After a critically acclaimed run at London's...

Nominated for Best Revival at the Olivier Awards 2024 Who I am Is not A side effect. Hearts and minds racing, Connie and Tristan are falling for each other fast. But is their sudden and intoxicating chemistry real, or a side effect of a new antidepressant? As two young volunteers in a clinical drug trial, their illicit romance poses startling...

Commander Vimes is sent to the wild, wintry, and Transylvania-like Uberwald to establish trade links with the King of the Dwarfs. However, he ends up trying to stop an inter-species war. On his side, though, is a talking dog, a reformed vampyre, and a self-made man. You can tell he's self-made because the stitches still show. Vimes may have arrived...

Adapted from Paula Hawkins’ novel – an international phenomenon selling over twenty million copies worldwide – this gripping new play will keep you guessing until the final moment. Rachel Watson longs for a different life. Her only escape is the perfect couple she watches through the train window every day, happy and in love. Or so it appears. When Rachel...

You bring such scandal to my house. In the domain of Bernarda Alba, a daughter who disobeys is no longer a daughter. Forced to live under their mother’s tight grip as they mourn their father’s death, can five sisters survive when young Adela dares for passion and freedom? Olivier Award-winner Harriet Walter (Succession) plays the formidable matriarch, guarding her reputation...

I am Heathcliff! Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. The Yorkshire moors tell an epic story of love, revenge and redemption. Rescued from the Liverpool docks as a child, Heathcliff is adopted by the Earnshaws and taken to live at Wuthering Heights. He finds a kindred spirit in Catherine Earnshaw and a fierce love...

The story of Desdemona from Shakespeare's Othello is re-imagined by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison, Malian singer and songwriter Rokia Traoré, and acclaimed stage director Peter Sellars. Morrison's response to Othello is an intimate dialogue of words and music between Desdemona and her African nurse Barbary. Morrison gives voice and depth to the female characters, letting them speak and sing...

Winner of the 2022 Olivier Award for Best New Play Life of Pi will make you believe in the power of theatre (Times). After a cargo ship sinks in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, there are five survivors stranded on a lifeboat - a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, a Royal Bengal tiger, and a sixteen-year-old boy named...

I think I'm a human being before anything else. I don't care what other people say. I don't care what people write in books. I need to think for myself. Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House premiered in 1879 in Copenhagen, the second in a series of realist plays by Ibsen, and immediately provoked controversy with its apparently feminist message and...

A gripping portrait of life in wartime Berlin and a vividly theatrical study of how paranoia can warp a society gripped by the fear of the night-time knock on the door. Based on true events, Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin follows a quietly courageous couple, Otto and Anna Quangel who, in dealing with their own heartbreak, stand up to the...

You look down to retrieve the ball but all you can see isLemonsLemons filling up the goalLemons writhing in the netLemons glistening and convulsing on the grass In the pressurised worlds of football and finance, two women carve their own path. After the loss of her dad, a goalkeeper prepares for the league final, while an ambitious banker battles her...

All the world's an Xbox and you're a player Candide is an optimist. A dreamer. He believes that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. But that belief is about to be tested as Candide's comfortable life is overtaken by an endless barrage of misfortune. First published in 1759, the story traces the journey of...

Unless it’s a football match… maybe then or ’em… at the supermarket… food and football, eh, the Englishman common ground. Neutral territory for the masses. Yeah, a place where no ideas are shared, borrowed or worked through… Perfect. Following acclaimed seasons at the National Theatre, Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’ extraordinary series of three state of the nation plays, Death...

People cross our paths for a reason. That, no doubt, reads like a horrible cliché but I never claimed to be a good writer, only an honest one. I believe the reason I met you was to become comfortable in my own skin. Ever seen a couple of old boys on a park bench and wondered what they are chatting...

Professor John Halder is a good man. But good men must adapt to survive. As the world faces its Second World War, Halder finds himself pulled into a movement with unthinkable consequences. Good is a story about a liberal-minded university professor who drifts well-meaningly into a position in the upper reaches of the Nazi administration. John Halder, a professor of...

Shortlisted for the Popcorn Writing Award 2024 Grieving is weird and expensive. Jamie can’t swim. Fuelled by guilt and a need to mend her broken family, at 30 years old, she's taking on her biggest fear — the ocean. With the help of a chipper swim instructor, a shady spiritual guide, and one cathartic crab sandwich, she questions, 'How many...

Today’s the day, right? That’s what you said. What you prophesized. Today’s the day we finish the job? We’re all in the business of telling stories. Building narratives. Constructing meaning. To keep ourselves safe, to make sense of the senseless, to explain the unexplainable, or simply just to pass the time. But what happens when the stories we inhabit begin...

THISISPOPBABY & The Abbey Theatre present If These Wigs Could Talk by Panti Bliss If These Wigs Could Talk meets Panti, a drag queen at fifty-three, after a lifetime of showbiz, shenanigans and making a show of herself, taking this moment to question what her purpose and place in the world is now. Via salacious stories, impassioned polemics, some seriously...

What will happen in England after we have won this war?Bunting! Bunting everywhere!After the bunting has been taken down.They will never take down our bunting! July 1940. After an aerial dog fight, Pilot Officer Jack Absolute flies home to win the heart of his old flame, Lydia Languish. Back on British soil, Jack’s advances soon turn to anarchy when the...

‘That is the story of our beginning. And this is the story of…the end’ Lovesong is the story of one couple, told from two different points in their lives – as young lovers in their 20s and as worldly companions looking back on their relationship. Their past and present selves collide in this haunting and beautiful tale of togetherness. All...