National Theatre – Archive

Like a glass-panelled clock, Deborah Warner’s Mother Courage and Her Children doesn’t just choose not to conceal its inner workings, it displays them, inviting the audience to marvel at the way the pieces fit together.

With infectious energy, Markeline pay a unique tribute to the miners of the Basque Country bringing old stories back to life and adventure to the National Theatre’s Square 2.

Hytner makes a shrewd directorial choice to modernise Jean Racine’s 17th century classic tragedy and tackles it as a psychodrama.

Can a Shakespearean play work without Shakespeare’s language? Pawel Szkotak proves so in his nightmarishly perverse adaptation of Macbeth.

Perhaps under other circumstances having ’solved’ All’s Well would be enough of an achievement, but this is the National we’re talking about; it’s perfectly justifiable to demand more.

Though Death and the King’s Horseman was programmed well before England People Very Nice opened and the accusations began, in context it feels like a comforting reassurance that the National Theatre does not condone racism.

It’s all too easy to remain detached from the subject of Iraq. Stovepipe aims to pick us up off the sidelines and deposit us bodily into the midst of the relief effort.

The play does a great job putting the problems of today’s multicultural London in perpsective, as each generation of immigrants eventually integrates into British life and then takes its turn oppressing the next.

Her Naked Skin is a bit like its heroine: courageous, demanding, articulate, divided, unpredictable and – despite good intentions – ultimately alienating.

Kinnear’s Piato and Cowan’s Lussurioso are just two of many excellent comic performances on display, but there’s nothing recognisable as a great tragic performance.