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.
The ghost of the King of Denmark tells his son Hamlet to avenge his murder by killing the new king, ...
The Queen of the Night enlists a handsome prince named Tamino to rescue her beautiful kidnapped daug...
Racial tensions come out of the woodwork when an upper-class white couple puts their suburban home o...
Roberto Bolle smuggles himself as a stowaway on an ocean liner that of Hamburg gen New York sets sai...
Based on Michael Morpurgo's novel and adapted for the stage by Nick Stafford, War Horse takes audien...
After a catastrophic global war, a young filmmaker awakens in the carnage and seeks refuge in the on...
On a distant island a man waits. Robbed of his position, power and wealth, his enemies have left him...
In 1846, Anthony Hope sails into London with the mysterious Sweeney Todd, a once-naive barber whose ...
In County Durham, England, 1984, a talented young dancer, Billy Elliot, stumbles out of the boxing r...
The peasant girl Giselle discovers the true identity of her lover Albrecht – and that he is promised...
Tennessee Williams’ twentieth century masterpiece Cat on a Hot Tin Roof played a strictly limited se...
East Germany 1978. Karoline and Robert, teenagers who used to live in the same house until Robert's ...
Dame Maggie Smith stars in the 1967 screen version of Franco Zeffirelli's exuberant National Theatre...
In the early hours of the morning on the campus of an American college, Martha, much to her husband ...
Madame Ranevskaya is a spoiled, aging aristocratic lady who returns from a trip to Paris to face the...
John Hodge's Collaborators centers on an imaginary encounter between Joseph Stalin and the playwrigh...
Hardcastle, a man of substance, looks forward yo acquainting his daughter with his old pal's son wit...
The innovative interweaving of romance and math was conceived. The 2008 Olivier Award winner for Bes...
Grace has agreed to marry Sir Harcourt in return for his financial support of her family. At a house...
Set in modern upper-crust Manhattan, an exploration of love and commitment as seen through the eyes ...