Best movies like National Theatre Live : A Small Family Business

A unique, carefully handpicked, selection of the best movies like National Theatre Live : A Small Family Business Starring Nigel Lindsay, Neal Barry, Stephen Beckett, Abby Cassidy, and more. If you liked National Theatre Live : A Small Family Business then you may also like: One Froggy Evening, Foster Child, Storm, Relatively Speaking, National Theatre Live: Angels In America — Part Two: Perestroika and many more popular movies featured on this list. You can further filter the list even more or get a random selection from the list of similar movies, to make your selection even easier.

Alan Ayckbourn's riotous exposure of entrepreneurial greed returns to the National Theatre, where it premiered in 1987, winning the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play.

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One Froggy Evening

A workman finds a singing frog in the cornerstone of an old building being demolished. But when he tries to cash in on his discovery, he finds the frog will sing only for him, and just croak for the talent agent and the audience in the theater he's spent his life savings on.

Foster Child

Gil Cardinal searches for his natural family and an understanding of the circumstances that led to his becoming a foster child. An important figure in the history of Canadian Indigenous filmmaking, Gil Cardinal was born to a Métis mother but raised by a non-Indigenous foster family, and with this auto-biographical documentary he charts his efforts to find his biological mother and to understand why he was removed from her. Considered a milestone in documentary cinema, it addressed the country’s internal colonialism in a profoundly personal manner, winning a Special Jury Prize at Banff and multiple international awards.

Storm

Two college students on a survival weekend in the wilderness cross paths with three desperate killers in what turns into a fight for life.

Relatively Speaking

It's the sixties. Gregory loves Ginny, and Ginny loves Gregory. But unfortunately Ginny also loves Philip, or at least she used to, and Philip loves her. Does Philip love his wife too? Ginny tells Gregory she's going to see her parents, when she's actually going to see Philip to break things off. Gregory, thinking to surprise her, gets there first, and the chaos begins.

National Theatre Live: Angels In America — Part Two: Perestroika

America in the mid-1980s. In the midst of the AIDS crisis and a conservative Reagan administration, New Yorkers grapple with life and death, love and sex, heaven and hell. This new staging of Tony Kushner's multi-award winning two-part play, Angels In America: A Gay Fantasia On National Themes, is directed by Olivier and Tony award winning director Marianne Elliott.

Is That All There Is?

Award winning director Lindsay Anderson subverts the mockumentary genre and presents to the audience a detailed and humored account of what truly means to be Lindsay Anderson.

The Knackery

Set in the very near future, The Knackery is the latest hard hitting feature film from Belfast's leading independent production house, Yellow Fever Productions (makers of the award winning Battle Of The Bone). All is not as it seems on the country's most watched family game-show... Reality television has taken things to the extreme and given the public, The Knackery, a show where six contestants fight for the grand prize of 'one million pounds'. To liven things up, the producers of the show release a horde of genetically modified zombies which puts a little bit more pressure on the fighters, in this Big Brother style beat-em-up. As an undercover reporter tries to scoop the story he's been waiting for, he soon comes across a kid who has entered the arena unaware of the consequences.

Remarkable Shades of Gay

Remarkable Shades of Gay is a compilation of 9 short films shot by award winning LGBTQ director William Branden Blinn between 2008 and 2014. Included in the compilation are Thirteen or So Minutes... (2008); Chased (2009); Never or Now (2013); Without a Mom (2011); Triple Standard (2010); Toeing the Line (2013); À la carte (2013); Truth or Dare (2014); and He She We (2010).

National Theatre Live: Julius Caesar

Caesar returns in triumph to Rome and the people pour out of their homes to celebrate. Alarmed by the autocrat’s popularity, the educated élite conspire to bring him down. After his assassination, civil war erupts on the streets of the capital. Nicholas Hytner’s production will thrust the audience into the street party that greets Caesar’s return, the congress that witnesses his murder, the rally that assembles for his funeral and the chaos that explodes in its wake.

National Theatre Live: A Disappearing Number

The innovative interweaving of romance and math was conceived. The 2008 Olivier Award winner for Best New Play, it has toured the world and was recently performed in New York as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

Still Kicking

Still Kicking: William Shatner and 'Christopher Plummer' is a one-hour television special that captures the memories and insights of these two icons. The setting is the stage of the renowned Stratford Shakespeare Festival Stage, where both men launched their careers in the 1950s, and were then propelled to international stardom. Both continue to produce incredible work. Plummer earned an Academy Award in 2012 for his performance in Beginners. He recently wrote a best-selling autobiography, and will soon be returning to the stage of the Stratford Festival for the theatre's 60th anniversary season. Shatner won four Emmys for his portrayal of Denny Crane on Boston Legal, and also recently wrote a best-selling book, and currently has an amazing four television series on air.

National Theatre Live: Fela!

A provocative and wholly unique hybrid of dance, theatre and music, FELA! explores the world of Afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Winner of three 2010 Tony Awards including Best Choreography (Bill T. Jones). Featuring many of Fela Kuti’s most captivating songs and Bill T. Jones’ visionary staging, FELA! – an original new creation – comes via Broadway to London and the National Theatre. FELA! explores the extravagant, decadent and rebellious world of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Using his pioneering music (a blend of jazz, funk and African rhythm and harmonies), FELA! reveals Kuti’s controversial life as an artist and political activist.

Way Upstream

Two couples go on a boating holiday together, and run into some strange people and events.

National Theatre Live: 50 Years on Stage

To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the National Theatre of Great Britain presents National Theatre: 50 Years on Stage, bringing together the best British actors for a unique evening of unforgettable performances, broadcast live from London to cinemas around the world.

By Jeeves

An adventure of the hapless Bertie Wooster, a young gentleman about town with a penchant for getting himself into personal difficulties, particularly with women. It is inevitable left to his unflappable manservant Jeeves to provide tidy and elegant rescues.

National Theatre Live: Allelujah!

Filmed live at London’s Bridge Theatre during its limited run. The Beth, an old fashioned cradle-to-grave hospital serving a town in Yorkshire, is threatened with closure as part of an efficiency drive. A documentary crew, eager to capture its fight for survival, follows the daily struggle to find beds on the Dusty Springfield Geriatric Ward, and the triumphs of the old people’s choir.

National Theatre Live: The Habit of Art

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.

Season's Greetings

Eight people attend a Christmas party in hope of having a pleasant celebration, however it takes various awkward turns and ends with one of the guests leaving sooner than they thought. Alan Ayckbourn's stage play adapted for BBC TV, 1986

National Theatre Live: The Magistrate

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.

Absurd Person Singular

A movie in three acts following three couples who, over three years, each host a Christmas party. The camera stays in the kitchen and we are treated to Ayckbourn's beautifully detailed look at middle class life.

Hollywould

Award winning writer, celebrity Mark Travis seeks inspiration by returning to his hometown. What he finds is not what he expected. Her name is Holly. What Holly would do, is like nothing Mark has ever experienced before.

Hamlet

Hamlet captures the Almeida Theatre's 2017 acclaimed production of William Shakespeare's great play, recorded as-live in its West End transfer on the stage of London's Harold Pinter Theatre. Robert Icke's innovative modern-dress production, featuring Andrew Scott, Juliet Stevenson, Angus Wright and Jessica Brown Findlay, has been widely acclaimed as a dazzlingly intelligent, forcefully contemporary staging. The Evening Standard hailed Andrew Scott's 'career-defining performance... he makes the most famous speeches feel fresh and unpredictable.'

National Theatre Live: Coriolanus

When an old adversary threatens Rome, the city calls once more on her hero and defender: Coriolanus. But he has enemies at home too. Famine threatens the city, the citizens’ hunger swells to an appetite for change, and on returning from the field Coriolanus must confront the march of realpolitik and the voice of an angry people.

National Theatre Live: Skylight

On a bitterly cold London evening, schoolteacher Kyra Hollis receives an unexpected visit from her former lover, Tom Sergeant, a successful and charismatic restaurateur whose wife has recently died. As the evening progresses, the two attempt to rekindle their once passionate relationship only to find themselves locked in a dangerous battle of opposing ideologies and mutual desires.

National Theatre Live: No Man's Land

One summer's evening, two ageing writers, Hirst and Spooner, meet in a Hampstead pub and continue their drinking into the night at Hirst's stately house nearby. As the pair become increasingly inebriated, and their stories increasingly unbelievable, the lively conversation soon turns into a revealing power game, further complicated by the return home of two sinister younger men.

National Theatre Live: Hedda Gabler

“I’ve no talent for life.” Just married. Bored already. Hedda longs to be free... Hedda and Tesman have just returned from their honeymoon and the relationship is already in trouble. Trapped but determined, Hedda tries to control those around her, only to see her own world unravel.

National Theatre Live: Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

In the early hours of the morning on the campus of an American college, Martha, much to her husband George’s displeasure, has invited the new professor and his wife to their home for some after-party drinks. As the alcohol flows and dawn approaches, the young couple are drawn into George and Martha’s toxic games until the evening reaches its climax in a moment of devastating truth-telling.

Proud Men

A cattle rancher faces off with his estranged son. A right-wing cattle rancher wrangles with his recently returned son, a soldier who went AWOL in Vietnam. The proud men butt chins in this arid macho weepie.

The Oresteia

Agamemnon returns home from the Trojan war and is murdered by his wife, setting off a chain of revenge that stretches across this trilogy of play. Directed by Peter Brook for the National Theatre, this is an all-male performance with masks.

National Theatre Live: Hamlet

A 2010 broadcast of Hamlet returns to cinemas as part of the NT's 50th anniversary celebrations. Following his celebrated performances at the National Theatre in Burnt by the Sun, The Revenger's Tragedy, Philistines and The Man of Mode, Rory Kinnear plays Hamlet in a dynamic new production of Shakespeare’s complex and profound play about the human condition, directed by Nicholas Hytner. He is joined by Clare Higgins (Gertrude), Patrick Malahide (Claudius), David Calder (Polonius), James Laurenson (Ghost/Player King) and Ruth Negga (Ophelia).

National Theatre Live: The Cherry Orchard

Madame Ranevskaya is a spoiled, aging aristocratic lady who returns from a trip to Paris to face the loss of her magnificent Cherry Orchard estate after a default on the mortgage. In denial, she continues living in the past, deluding herself and her family, while the beautiful cherry trees are being axed down by the re-possessor Lopakhin, her former serf, who has his own agenda.

National Theatre Live: Hansard

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.

National Theatre Live: The Madness of George III

It’s 1786 and King George III is the most powerful man in the world. But his behaviour is becoming increasingly erratic as he succumbs to fits of lunacy. With the King’s mind unravelling at a dramatic pace, ambitious politicians and the scheming Prince of Wales threaten to undermine the power of the Crown, and expose the fine line between a King and a man.

National Theatre Live: The Hard Problem

Acclaimed playwright Tom Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love, Arcadia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead) returns to the National Theatre with his highly-anticipated new play The Hard Problem, directed by Nicholas Hytner (Othello, Hamlet, One Man, Two Guvnors). Hilary, a young psychology researcher at a brainscience institute, is nursing a private sorrow and a troubling question at work, where psychology and biology meet. If there is nothing but matter, what is consciousness? This is ‘the hard problem’ which puts Hilary at odds with her colleagues who include her first mentor Spike, her boss Leo and the billionaire founder of the institute, Jerry. Is the day coming when the computer and the fMRI scanner will answer all the questions psychology can ask? Meanwhile Hilary needs a miracle, and she is prepared to pray for one.

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