Tickets are on sale now for this exciting new series of plays — captured live in high-definition — from London’s prestigious National Theatre.

The new and groundbreaking National Theatre Live series brings the best of British theatre, direct from the stage to movie theaters around the world. From the heart of London, each performance is captured live in high-definition and broadcast on a delayed basis via satellite, giving audiences an extraordinary close-up view of the world-class productions that take center stage at the National Theatre of Great Britain.

Reserved seating tickets are available online, on the phone, or in person. For phone ticket sales, please call the State Theatre box office at 231-947-3446. Tickets are $20, or $18 for Members, Seniors and Students. View the Reserved Seating Chart HERE. If you require wheelchair, mobility, or companion seating, please call our ticketing liaison, Judy Trentham, at 231-944-3040.

NT Live: One Man, Two Guvnors

Thursday, October 20 at 7:00 pm
Suitable for All Audiences / 180 min.

Fired from his skiffle band, Francis Henshall becomes minder to Roscoe Crabbe, a small time East End hood, now in Brighton to collect £6,000 from his fiancee’s dad. But Roscoe is really his sister Rachel posing as her own dead brother, who’s been killed by her boyfriend Stanley Stubbers.

Holed up at The Cricketers’ Arms, the permanently ravenous Francis spots the chance of an extra meal ticket and takes a second job with one Stanley Stubbers, who is hiding from the police and waiting to be re-united with Rachel. To prevent discovery, Francis must keep his two guvnors apart. Simple.

In Richard Bean’s English version of Carlo Goldoni’s The Servent of Two Masters, a classic Italian comedy where sex, food and money are high on the agenda. James Corden returns to the National for the first time since The History Boys to play Francis.

NT Live: The Kitchen

Thursday, November 3 at 7:00 pm
All Ages / 180 min.

1950s London. In the kitchen of an enormous West End restaurant, the orders are piling up: a post-war feast of soup, fish, cutlets, omelettes and fruit flans.

"Fifteen hundred customers an' half of them eating fish. I had to start work on a Friday."

Thrown together by their work, chefs, waitresses and porters from across Europe – English, Irish, German, Jewish – argue and flirt as they race to keep up. Peter, a high-spirited young cook, seems to thrive on the pressure. In between preparing dishes, he manages to strike up an affair with married waitress Monique, the whole time dreaming of a better life. But in the all-consuming clamour of the kitchen, nothing is far from the brink of collapse.

"We all said we wouldn’t last the day, but tell me – what is there a man can’t get used to?"

Arnold Wesker’s extraordinary play premiered at the Royal Court in 1959 and has since been performed in over 30 countries. The Kitchen puts the workplace centre stage in a blackly funny and furious examination of life lived at breakneck speed, when work threatens to define who we are.

NT Live: Collaborators

Thursday, December 1 at 7:00 pm
All Ages / 195 min.

A new play by John Hodge (screenwriter of Trainspotting, Shallow Grave, The Beach), directed by National Theatre Artistic Director Nicholas Hytner.

Moscow, 1938. A dangerous place to have a sense of humour; even more so a sense of freedom.

Mikhail Bulgakov, living among dissidents, stalked by secret police, has both. And then he’s offered a poisoned chalice: a commission to write a play about Stalin to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. Inspired by historical fact, Collaborators embarks on a surreal journey into the fevered imagination of the writer as he loses himself in a macabre and disturbingly funny relationship with the omnipotent subject of his drama.

Killing my enemies is easy. The challenge is to change the way they think, to control their minds. And I think I controlled yours pretty well. In years to come, I’ll be able to say: Bulgakov? Yeah, we even trained him. He gave up. He saw the light. We broke him, we can break anybody. It’s man versus monster, Mikhail. And the monster always wins.

John Hodge’s blistering new play depicts a lethal game of cat and mouse through which the appalling compromises and humiliations inflicted on any artist by those with power are held up to scrutiny. Alex Jennings plays Bulgakov and Simon Russell Beale tackles the role of Stalin.

NT Live: The Comedy of Errors

Thursday, March 1, 2012 at 7:00 pm
All Ages / 195 min.
Best of British Theatre broadcast live to screens around the world

I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?
Sleeping or waking? mad or well advised?
Known unto these, and to myself disguised!

Two sets of twins separated at birth collide in the same city without meeting for one crazy day, as multiple mistaken identities lead to confusion on a grand scale. And for no one more so than Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant Dromio who, in search of their brothers, arrive in a land entirely foreign to their distant home. A buzzing metropolis, to the outsiders it appears a place of wonderment and terror, where baffling gifts and unexplained hostilities abound.

Do you know me, sir? Am I Dromio? Am I your
man? Am I myself.

Consistently recognised by strangers, the visitors question their very selves as the turmoil escalates. Meanwhile, Aegeon, father to the Antipholus twins, has been captured searching for his sons and, as an illegal immigrant, is sentenced to death at sunset. Shakespeare’s furiously paced comedy will be staged in a contemporary world into which walk three prohibited foreigners who see everything for the first time. Lenny Henry plays Antipholus of Syracuse.