The National Theatre is to present Nottingham Playhouse’s revival of Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III as the next offering in its popular streaming service. Mark Gatiss plays the unravelling monarch in the 2018 production, which was broadcast to cinemas that year for NT Live. The play, directed by Adam Penford with a cast including Adrian Scarborough and Debra Gillett, will be available online for a week from 11 June.
It is the first production from outside London to be streamed as part of the National Theatre at Home initiative, which has reached a huge global audience online while the South Bank venue remains closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. The season continues this week with its 10th stream, Coriolanus, a Donmar Warehouse production starring Tom Hiddleston, with Gatiss in a supporting role. It is available from Thursday at 7pm. The streams are free to view but donations are invited. The National’s artistic director, Rufus Norris, has warned that the UK’s theatre industry is facing potential devastation as a result of the Covid-19 lockdown and that the NT is “haemorrhaging” money.
Gatiss is set to return to Nottingham Playhouse as the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge’s business partner, Jacob Marley, in his own version of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. The production is due to open at Nottingham Playhouse in October. The theatre, which is a charity and relies on ticket sales for more than 70% of its income, says the crisis has left it in a “worrying position”. It recently announced a new online-only production for children, Noah and the Peacock, directed and written especially for Zoom by Jeff James. Recommended for five- to-nine-year-olds, it runs from 19-21 June.
