National Theatre Live: The Audience

A comedy musical stage version of the Phantom of the Opera, filmed live on-stage during a performance in Florida.

The ultimate royal family crisis. Prince Hamlet's father is dead, poisoned by his uncle, who has usurped the throne and married his mother, the Queen. When the dead King's ghost appears, commanding his son to revenge his foul and most unnatural murder, Hamlet is set on a course of action that can only end in the destruction of a dynasty and his own extinction.

An aged king decides to divide his kingdom between his three daughters, according to which of them is most eloquent in praising him. His favourite, Cordelia, says nothing. Simon Russell Beale, whose recent appearances at the National include Timon of Athens and Collaborators, takes the title role in Shakespeare’s tragedy.

The Bergers, a blue-collar Jewish family living in an overstuffed tenement and undone by the Depression, struggle through hard times and dream of a better future in this 1972 production of Clifford Odets' pungent play. Personalities and politics clash as Odets' mélange of characters try to survive on pennies a day. Walter Matthau plays cynical World War I amputee Moe Axelrod, and Leo Fuchs portrays the family's iron-willed leftist grandfather.

A week in the life of the exploited, child newspaper sellers in turn-of-the-century New York. When their publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, tries to squeeze a little more profit out of their labours, they organize a strike, only to be confronted with the Pulitzer's hard-ball tactics.