National Theatre Live: Hansard

Nov 7, 2019

1h 34m

★ 8.7

Thirty years of wedded bliss. The picture-perfect marriage. Or is it?

Overview

It's a summer's morning in 1988 and Tory politician Robin Hesketh has returned home to the idyllic Cotswold house he shares with his wife of 30 years, Diana. But all is not as blissful as it seems. Diana has a stinking hangover, a fox is destroying the garden, and secrets are being dug up all over the place. As the day draws on, what starts as gentle ribbing and the familiar rhythms of marital scrapping quickly turns to blood-sport.

Genres

Drama

Production Companies

National Theatre

National Theatre Live: Hansard Trailers

Cast

Diana Hesketh

Lindsay Duncan

Robin Hesketh

Alex Jennings

The Bergers, a blue-collar Jewish family living in an overstuffed tenement and undone by the Depression, struggle through hard times and dream of a better future in this 1972 production of Clifford Odets' pungent play. Personalities and politics clash as Odets' mélange of characters try to survive on pennies a day. Walter Matthau plays cynical World War I amputee Moe Axelrod, and Leo Fuchs portrays the family's iron-willed leftist grandfather.

6.4

Company

Dec 10, 1996

Set in modern upper-crust Manhattan, an exploration of love and commitment as seen through the eyes of a charming perpetual bachelor questioning his single state and his enthusiastically married, slightly envious friends.

6.0

Wind Over the City

Nov 16, 1996

In a small, poor town, a young worker falls in love with an actress from a traveling theater troupe and tries to keep her close, dreaming and working hard to rebuild a new town while the troupe increasingly faces decline and the end of its run.

0.0

National Theatre Collection: Translations

Jul 31, 2018

Owen, the prodigal son, returns to rural Donegal from Dublin. With him are two British army officers. Their ambition is to create a map of the area, replacing the Gaelic names with English. It is an administrative act with radical consequences.

0.0

National Theatre Live: Consent

May 9, 2017

Why is Justice blind? Is she impartial? Or is she blinkered? Friends take opposing briefs in a rape case. The key witness is a woman whose life seems a world away from theirs. At home, their own lives begin to unravel as every version of the truth is challenged. Nina Raine’s powerful, painful, funny play sifts the evidence from every side and puts justice herself in the dock. Consent received its world premiere in a co-production with Out of Joint at the National Theatre in April 2017. This archive recording was captured on 9th May, 2017.

0.0

Macbeth: Too Much Blood

Nov 22, 2020

No overview available.

0.0

Jedermann

Aug 23, 1958

No overview available.

8.0

Things I Know to Be True

Feb 22, 2017

As beautifully touching as it is funny and bold, Things I Know To Be True tells the story of a family and marriage through the eyes of four grown siblings struggling to define themselves beyond their parents’ love and expectations. Parents Bob and Fran have worked their fingers to the bone and with their four children grown and ready to fly the nest it might be time to relax and enjoy the roses. But the changing seasons bring home some shattering truths. Featuring Frantic Assembly’s celebrated physicality, and co-directed by Frantic Assembly’s Tony and Olivier Award nominated Artistic Director Scott Graham and State Theatre Company’s Artistic Director Geordie Brookman, Things I Know To Be True is a complex and intense study of the mechanics of a family that is both poetic and brutally frank.

6.0

National Theatre Live: Les Blancs

Sep 1, 2019

An African country teeters on the edge of civil war. A society prepares to drive out its colonial present and claim an independent future. Racial tensions boil over. Tshembe, returned home from England for his father’s funeral, finds himself in the eye of the storm.

6.5

High School Musical

Jan 20, 2006

A popular high school athlete and an academically gifted girl get roles in the school musical and develop a friendship that threatens East High's social order.

7.9

Rent: Filmed Live on Broadway

Nov 21, 2008

Set in New York City's gritty East Village, the revolutionary rock opera RENT tells the story of a group of bohemians struggling to live and pay their rent. "Measuring their lives in love," these starving artists strive for success and acceptance while enduring the obstacles of poverty, illness and the AIDS epidemic.

6.1

De-Lovely

Jul 2, 2004

From Paris to Venice to Broadway to Hollywood, the lives of Cole Porter and his wife, Linda Lee Thomas were never less than glamorous and wildly unconventional. And though Cole's thirst for life strained their marriage, Linda never stopped being his muse, inspiring some of the greatest songs of the twentieth century.

5.8

Wonderful and Loved by All

Aug 24, 2007

Isabella Eklöf is an unemployed actress in her early thirties. Her friends all enjoy stable relationships, children and successful careers. In order to jump-start her life she decides to lie a bit on her next job application with unexpected consequences.

7.9

National Theatre Live: A Streetcar Named Desire

Sep 16, 2014

As Blanche’s fragile world crumbles, she turns to her sister Stella for solace – but her downward spiral brings her face to face with the brutal, unforgiving Stanley Kowalski.

5.8

Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle

Sep 7, 1994

Dorothy Parker remembers the heyday of the Algonquin Round Table, a circle of friends whose barbed wit, like hers, was fueled by alcohol and flirted with despair.

8.1

Into the Woods

Mar 15, 1991

In a woods filled with magic and fairy tale characters, a baker and his wife set out to end the curse put on them by their neighbor, a spiteful witch.

6.5

Antigone

May 5, 2003

Having defied the ban on Creon and offered a burial to Polynice, her treacherous homeland brother, Antigone is condemned to a slow death in a stone tomb, despite the interposition of Hémon, her fiance, the son of Creon . Nevertheless, Creon ends up following the advice of his diviner Tiresias and, fearing the wrath of the gods, buries Polynices with dignity. When he is about to free Antigone, the young woman had already hanged herself. Mad with pain, Hémon commits suicide by his side.

8.0

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Sep 12, 1982

In 1846, Anthony Hope sails into London with the mysterious Sweeney Todd, a once-naive barber whose life and marriage was uprooted by a corrupt justice system. Todd confides in Nellie Lovett, the owner of a local meat pie shop, and the two become partners, as Todd swears revenge on those that have wronged him and decides to take up his old profession.

3.2

From Here to Eternity

Jul 3, 2014

In 1941 Hawaii, a private is cruelly punished for not boxing on his unit's team, while his captain's wife and second in command are falling in love.

6.0

Story of an Unknown Actor

Jan 1, 1976

Pavel Pavlovich Goryaev is not that young of an actor. For many years he plays in the provincial theater in leading roles. The director of a play based on a play that was written for Goryaev takes the young actor for his role. Goryaev at first falls into despair, leaves the theater, turns to friends. After a while he digests what happened and realizes that it is time to leave the stage with dignity.

National Theatre Live: Hansard

Overview

Genres

Production Companies

National Theatre Live: Hansard Trailers