National Theatre

Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
Anthologization	Bryony Lavery	BL 's More Light, a play for children of secondary-school age commissioned by the Education Department of the Royal National Theatre , was published by Faber and Faber in New Connections: New Plays for Young People. OCLC WorldCat.
Employer	Harold Pinter	As well as writing (in many other genres as well as for the theatre) Pinter also directed regularly: for instance, The Man in the Glass Booth by Robert Shaw , 1967, Otherwise Engaged by his...
Employer	Winsome Pinnock	In her late teens WP planned to become an actor. She abandoned a brief career on stage partly because she found herself being typecast in maternal roles. She sees her work as a writer as...
Family and Intimate relationships	Edith Lyttelton	After EL 's death, Oliver Lyttelton carried on his mother's work for the National Theatre as an act of filial piety, Oliver Lyttelton, first Viscount Chandos,. The Memoirs of Lord Chandos. Bodley Head, 1962. xv eventually assuming the role of Chairman of the Board in 1962 and Life...
Intertextuality and Influence	Caryl Churchill	The 1986 deregulation of the stock market—the Big Bang—by fortunate coincidence Churchill, Caryl. Serious Money. Methuen, 1990. prelims took place during the play's workshop and development period. The play centres on a corporate takeover, which functions allegorically: a corporate raider...
Intertextuality and Influence	Mary Shelley	The legacy of Frankenstein is immense and widely diffused. It has been successfully filmed not once but several times, as simple horror movie and as intellectualised retelling with a gruesome birth scene only marginally connected...
Literary responses	Enid Bagnold	The Chalk Garden remains EB 's best-known work. While it has had frequent revivals by amateur and professional companies, Bagnold was disappointed that the National Theatre never expressed interest in reviving it, an omission she...
Literary responses	Pam Gems	This play brought PG 's work to the attention of critics and playgoers alike. While reviews were generally quite positive, some had difficulty accepting the play's feminist perspective. For instance, Ted Whitehead in The Spectator...
Literary responses	Winsome Pinnock	WP was touched and delighted when members of the National Theatre audience (mostly white and relatively affluent) saw the likeness between their own parents and those on stage. Stephenson, Heidi, and Natasha Langridge. Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on Playwriting. Methuen Drama, 1997. In 1991 this play won her the...
Literary responses	Caryl Churchill	Top Girls achieved tremendous popular and critical success. In 1999, National Theatre audiences voted it one of the top One Hundred Plays of the Century—and the only play by a woman to make the top...
Occupation	Edith Lyttelton	EL served on boards of several theatres, including the Vic-Wells , the National Theatre , and the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford upon Avon. She was particularly devoted to the National Theatre cause and...
Performance of text	Harold Pinter	HP performed in his own short dramatic satire Press Conference at the National Theatre . Billington, Michael. Harold Pinter. Faber and Faber, 2007. 415 Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Performance of text	Bryony Lavery	Faber reprinted the BL play in a slim volume on its own in 2001. Both this and a companion piece, Red Sky (in which modern archaeologists encounter the fragile and beautiful traces of the past)...
Performance of text	Sarah Daniels	The National Theatre produced SD 's feminist play Neaptide on its Cottesloe stage. Printed the same year, the play is about lesbians living with prejudice and concealment. Griffin, Gabriele. “Violence, Abuse, and Gender Relations in the Plays of Sarah Daniels”. The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights, edited by Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 194 -11. 207 Whitaker’s Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons, 2003. (1988) Daniels, Sarah. Plays: One. Methuen, 1991. 234 Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Performance of text	Githa Sowerby	In the 1980s and 1990s, Rutherford and Son enjoyed several revivals by feminist theatre groups and directors, including productions by Mrs Worthington's Daughters in June 1980 (abridged by Michelene Wandor ); Southern Lights at the...

Timeline

19 May 1908

A campaign to establish a National Theatre began with a mass meeting at the Lyceum Theatre , London.

9 March 1949

A National Theatre Act was passed by the British Parliament , which allowed the Treasury to contribute towards national theatre costs.

13 July 1951

Queen Elizabeth II laid the foundation stone of the National Theatre , on the South Bank, London.

11 April 1967

Tom Stoppard 's first great stage success, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, had its professional debut at the National Theatre in London. A version had been seen at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival of...

25 October 1976

The National Theatre 's new home on the South Bank officially opened with a royal gala performance of a comedy by Carlo Goldoni in its larger auditorium, the Olivier.

13 April 1993

Tom Stoppard 's Arcadia, a play whose action is divided between the early nineteenth century and the present day, opened (after previews) at the National Theatre in London.

September-November 2005

An exhibition at the National Theatre in London, Flogging the Jewels, celebrated thirty years of the company now called Sphinx (formerly the Women's Theatre Group).

By 13 May 2007

The director of London's National Theatre , Nicholas Hytner , alleged that critics (whom he called dead white men) showed misogyny in reviewing plays by women.