National Theatre Live: Henry V

The timeless tale of Ebenezer Scrooge comes to thrilling new life as Tony winner Jefferson Mays plays over 50 roles in a virtuosic masterclass of a performance that must be seen to be believed.

A true story about one US and one USSR delegate who, during 1982 talks in Geneva between USA and USSR on limiting medium-range nukes in Europe, met by accident in a nearby forest while on a stroll and informally started a key discussion.

A screenwriter gets conned out of selling a script to a Hollywood producer by his brother, who pitches his own idea for a movie. This video recording of the 1982 Steppenwolf Theatre Company production was later broadcast by PBS.

The innocent Candide discovers that human beings aren't all they are cracked up to be and ultimately focuses on building his own life on his own terms.

The story takes place entirely in a bedroom dominated by a couple's four-poster bed, taking them through fifty years of marriage, through happiness and sorrow, through good times and bad, through childbirth, parenthood, and the eventual sadness from the absence of their children. In the end, they face the future together, while remembering their past.

The Moorish general Othello is manipulated into thinking that his new wife Desdemona has been carrying on an affair with his lieutenant Michael Cassio when in reality it is all part of the scheme of a bitter ensign named Iago.

Ralph Fiennes leads the cast in David Hare’s blazing account of the most powerful man in New York, a master manipulator whose legacy changed the city forever. For forty uninterrupted years, Robert Moses exploited those in office through a mix of charm and intimidation. Motivated at first by a determination to improve the lives of New York City’s workers, he created parks, bridges and 627 miles of expressway to connect the people to the great outdoors. Faced with resistance by protest groups campaigning for a very different idea of what the city should become, will the weakness of democracy be exposed in the face of his charismatic conviction?

The epic love story tells the tragic tale of young Vietnamese bar girl Kim, orphaned by war, who falls in love with American GI Chris — but their lives are torn apart by the fall of Saigon.

National Theatre Live’s 2010 broadcast of Alan Bennett’s acclaimed play The Habit of Art, with Richard Griffiths, Alex Jennings and Frances de la Tour, returns to cinemas as part of the National Theatre's 50th anniversary celebrations. Benjamin Britten, sailing uncomfortably close to the wind with his new opera, Death in Venice, seeks advice from his former collaborator and friend, W H Auden. During this imagined meeting, their first for twenty-five years, they are observed and interrupted by, amongst others, their future biographer and a young man from the local bus station. Alan Bennett’s play is as much about the theatre as it is about poetry or music. It looks at the unsettling desires of two difficult men, and at the ethics of biography. It reflects on growing old, on creativity and inspiration, and on persisting when all passion’s spent: ultimately, on the habit of art.

In 2008, as the Large Hadron Collider searches for the Higgs boson, tragedy throws two sisters together. The collision threatens them all with chaos. Olivia Colman and Olivia Williams play the sisters in this drama from writer Lucy Kirkwood.

A flat in Ladbroke Grove, West London. 1952. When Hester Collyer is found by her neighbours in the aftermath of a failed suicide attempt, the story of her tempestuous affair with a former RAF pilot and the breakdown of her marriage to a High Court judge begins to emerge. With it comes a portrait of need, loneliness and long-repressed passion. Behind the fragile veneer of post-war civility burns a brutal sense of loss and longing.