The Audience with Helen Mirren back for an NTLive encore
For 60 years Elizabeth II has met each of her 12 Prime Ministers in a weekly audience at Buckingham Palace, a meeting like no other in British public life, it is private. Both parties have an unspoken agreement never to repeat what is said. Not even to their spouses.
From Churchill to Cameron, each Prime Minister has used these private conversations as a sounding board and a confessional, sometimes intimate, sometimes explosive. From young mother to grandmother, these private audiences chart the arc of the second Elizabethan Age. Politicians come and go through the revolving door of electoral politics, while the Queen has remained constant, waiting to welcome her next Prime Minister.
The Audience, starring Helen Mirren, breaks this contract of silence and imagines a series of pivotal meetings between the Downing Street incumbents and their Queen. The Peter Morgan, Stephen Daldry production ran to stellar reviews from early March through mid-June of this year at the Gielgud Theatre in London’s West End. If you missed it, enter National Theatre Live to save the day.
National Theatre Live is The National Theatre of Great Britain’s initiative to broadcast live performances from the National’s stages to cinemas worldwide. Back in June, the most recent National Theatre Live broadcast was the brilliant West End production of The Audience, with Helen Mirren reprising her Academy Award winning role as Queen Elizabeth II, live from London’s Gielgud Theatre beaming it to theaters around the world.
If you missed it a second time, you have one more opportunity. Encore screenings of The Audience with Helen Mirren are taking place in theaters worldwide. If you missed the June broadcast, DO NOT let this happen again. In North Texas, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth will be rebroadcasting this brilliant production on Wednesday, August 28 at 2:00p and 7:00p.
Next up for National Theatre Live is another ‘you don’t want to miss this’ moment coming your way in October, a major new production of William Shakespeare’s Othello. The National Theatre presents the celebrated play about the destructive power of jealousy starring Adrian Lester (Hustle) in the title role with Rory Kinnear (Skyfall) as the duplicitous Iago.
NT Live screenings of Othello will begin in theaters worldwide on Thursday, 26 September. For a list of screening venues, dates and times around the world, click here.
