The UK’s National Theatre has added star wattage to its 2026 season with luminous names such as Cate Blanchett (Tár, Carol), Sandra Oh (Killing Eve, Grey’s Anatomy), Nina Hoss (Hedda) and Lorraine Toussaint (The Equalizer, Orange Is the New Black) all set to perform on London’s Southbank this year.
Blanchett, a two-time Oscar winner, is returning to the flagship artistic venue, having made her debut there in 2019 in Martin Crimp’s When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, directed by Katie Mitchell.
This time Blanchett reunites with Hoss, her Tár co-lead, and Black Doves breakthrough Ella Lily Hyland in the world premiere of Electra / Persona, which runs on the National’s Lyttelton stage in the fall. It’s being directed by Benedict Andrews, who drew extraordinary performances from Gillian Anderson, Ben Foster and Vanessa Kirby in a celebrated 2014 Old Vic revival of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.
For this new work, Andrews has forged Sophocles’ Electra with Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 gripping classic, Persona, a film that starred Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson playing, respectively, a famous theatre actress, inexplicably struck mute, who is cared for by a young nurse.
Andrews says that the play will interrogate the inner life of an actress “and query how grief can make us strangers to ourselves.” The production’s music has been composed by Oscar-winning composer Hildur Guðnadóttir (Joker, Tár).
Blanchett’s ramping up her stage appearances having led an acclaimed revival last spring of Chekhov’s The Seagull, directed by Thomas Ostermeier at the Barbican Theatre. There’s much chatter about The Seagull heading to New York with Blanchett and the Barbican company in 2027.
Oh is making her National debut leading a new adaptation of Molière’s The Misanthrope from the pen of Martin Crimp. The production will be directed by NT artistic director Indhu Rubasingham and will play in the Lyttelton Theatre from June 16-August 1.
The big deal about this particular Misanthrope is that it’s a gender reimagining with Molière’s infamous protagonist, the misanthropic Alceste, now called Alice, a best-selling novelist who, as Crimp via Molière would have it, “despises the hollow contemporary mantras of kindness and respect. But the bolder she becomes in speaking out, the more colleagues avoid her ,and the more her personal relationships begin to fracture.”
Oh, with her quicksilver wit, was born to play Alice. She’s such a great actress, and I can say that having watched every reel, practically, of her screen work including every episode she did of Killing Eve and every single episode she shot of Grey’s Anatomy for 10 seasons. Hers were memorable shows in a way that the subsequent episodes have not been.
Rubasingham directed an earlier version of Crimp’s The Misanthrope over two decades ago at the Chichester Festival Theatre. She tells Deadline that it’s “a real joy to come back to this play.”
The artistic chief adds that she’s “thrilled Sandra Oh, who I have known and admired for a long time, is coming to join me at the National.”
Performing alongside Oh will be Paul Chahidi (The Night Manager Season 2) and Abigail Cruttenden (Ragdoll).
It’s also a big deal, in my book, that Toussaint, a much garlanded stage actress, will join Letitia Wright (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) in the previously announced revival of Tracey Scott Wilson’s newsroom thriller The Story, directed by NT associate artist Clint Dyer. Aliyah Odoffin (All My Sons), Wilf Scolding (Andor) and Ashley Thomas (Hostage) also star.
Performances for The Story run from August 27-September 3 on the mighty Olivier stage.
The cast also includes Tee Arnold, Donna Augustin, Antonia Bernath (Downton Abbey), Linseigh Green,Jay Simpson and Unique Spencer.
English (US) ·