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.
Related Movies
Som ni vill ha det (1986)
A production of Shakespeare's "As You Like It" filmed for television. After the overthrowing of the old duke by his tyrannical brother, the duke's daughter Rosalind disguises herself as a man and sets out to find her banished father while also counselling her clumsy suitor Orlando in the art of wooing.
National Theatre Live: Saint Joan (2017)
Josie Rourke directs Gemma Arterton as Joan of Arc in Bernard Shaw's electrifying classic. Performed at the Donmar Warehouse, and part of the NT Live series of broadcasts.
Dare (2009)
When a pompous actor tells good girl Alexa that she hasn't lived, she embarks on a bold journey that takes her to mysterious bad boy Johnny. Envious, her shy best friend Ben also dares to pursue Johnny.
National Theatre Live: Straight Line Crazy (2022)
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?
Geliebte Hochstaplerin (1961)
Roberto Bolle smuggles himself as a stowaway on an ocean liner that of Hamburg gen New York sets sail. On board is also his lover Barbara Shadwell, whom he wants to marry, but who, at the request of her mother, the syrup millionaire Ceila Shadwell, should marry the oatmeal millionaire David.
National Theatre Live: War Horse (2014)
Based on Michael Morpurgo's novel and adapted for the stage by Nick Stafford, War Horse takes audiences on an extraordinary journey from the fields of rural Devon to the trenches of First World War France.
National Theatre Live: The Deep Blue Sea (2016)
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.
Hamlet at Elsinore (1964)
The ghost of the King of Denmark tells his son Hamlet to avenge his murder by killing the new king, Hamlet's uncle. Hamlet feigns madness, contemplates life and death, and seeks revenge. His uncle, fearing for his life, also devises plots to kill Hamlet. An historic BBC production taped on location in and around Kronborg castle in Elsinore (Denmark), in which the play is set.
Private Lives (2013)
Elyot Chase and Amanda Prynne are glamorous, rich, reckless…and divorced. Five years later, their love for one another is unexpectedly rekindled when they take adjoining suites of a French hotel while honeymooning with their new spouses. This chance encounter instantly reignites their passion, and they fling themselves headlong into a whirlwind of love and lust once more, without a thought for partners present or turbulences past. This Chichester Festival Theatre production of Noël Coward’s Privates Lives was filmed live at London's Gielgud Theatre.
National Theatre Live: The Lehman Trilogy (2019)
On a cold September morning in 1844 a young man from Bavaria stands on a New York dockside. Dreaming of a new life in the new world. He is joined by his two brothers and an American epic begins. 163 years later, the firm they establish – Lehman Brothers – spectacularly collapses into bankruptcy, and triggers the largest financial crisis in history.
National Theatre Live: Death of England: Delroy (2020)
Michael Balogun plays Delroy with 'firecracker energy’ in this new work by Clint Dyer and Roy Williams, which explores a Black working class man searching for truth and confronting his relationship with Great Britain.
The Sandman (2000)
One of several collaborative dance films by the Brothers Quay & (dancer, choreographer) William Tuckett. Little enough info around on line, but there's briefly by way of Wikipedia entry. Adapted rather loosely from the works of the E.T.A. Hoffman. Familiar Quays' tropes, much in evidence: automata, trompe l'oeil effects, etc. No credit on the sound design (which is fairly elaborate), tho' that is possibly Larry Sider.
The Resurrection of Gavin Stone (2017)
Gavin Stone, a washed-up former child star, is forced to do community service at a local megachurch and pretends to be Christian so he can land the part of Jesus in their annual Passion Play, only to discover that the most important role of his life is far from Hollywood.
Waitress: The Musical (2023)
A waitress and expert pie-maker dreams of a way out of her small town and rocky marriage.
The Fourposter (1955)
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.
National Theatre Live: People (2013)
People spoil things; there are so many of them and the last thing one wants is them traipsing through one’s house. But with the park a jungle and a bath on the billiard table, what is one to do? Dorothy wonders if an attic sale could be a solution.
National Theatre Live: The Magistrate (2013)
Academy Award nominee and Tony Award-winner John Lithgow (Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Shrek, 3rd Rock from the Sun) takes the title role in Arthur Wing Pinero’s uproarious Victorian farce, directed by Olivier Award-winner Timothy Sheader (Crazy for You and Into the Woods, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, London). In a similar vein to the National Theatre’s smash-hit classic comedies, She Stoops to Conquer and London Assurance, The Magistrate is sure to have audiences doubled up with laughter. When amiable magistrate Posket (John Lithgow) marries Agatha (Olivier Award-winner Nancy Carroll, After the Dance), little does he realise she’s dropped five years from her age – and her son’s. When her deception looks set to be revealed, it sparks a series of hilarious indignities and outrageous mishaps.