NTlive – THE AUDIENCE starring HELEN MIRREN – JUNE 2026 @ AUSTRALIAN CINEMAS – SHARMILL FILMS

AN OVATION FOR THE AGES – Precious, unforgettable, rare moments in a theatregoer’s life, arrives when the boundary between performer and character dissolves so completely, that one forgets to breathe. NTlive’s THE AUDIENCE, captured in crystalline high definition during its original sell-out run at London’s Gielgud Theatre, is composed almost entirely of such moments. This is not merely a play, it is an act of imaginative resurrection, a séance that conjures sixty years of British political history through the prism of a single, extraordinary relationship, that between a sovereign and her twelve prime ministers. Across its generous 130 minutes running time, Peter Morgan’s script, Stephen Daldry’s impeccable direction, plus a company of amazing actors operating at the absolute peak of their powers combine to create something that transcends the limitations of both stage and screen. For those of us fortunate enough to experience it through the National Theatre Live cinema series, the gift is magnified twentyfold. We are not merely watching a play, since we are all being granted an audience with pure greatness. Without a shadow of a doubt, a five-star masterpiece event, and I intend to explain exactly why, including all the detail and the devotion, which this quite extraordinary work, so justly deserves.
Very Highly Recommended. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

THE GENESIS OF A MASTERPIECE – To fully appreciate what THE AUDIENCE achieves, one must first understand the audacity of its central conceit. Since 1952, through war and peace, through scandal and celebration, through the dissolution of THE EMPIRE and now the digital revolution, our Queen Elizabeth II has met with her Prime Minister for a private weekly audience. These meetings are not minuted. No aides are present. No recordings are made. The participants do not speak of what transpires. This constitutional black box, unique among modern democracies, duly represents perhaps the most tantalizing dramatic opportunity in contemporary political history. Peter Morgan, the playwright who had already explored the Queen’s life in the acclaimed film “THE QUEEN” (for which Helen Mirren, won her Academy Award), recognized that this void of verifiable fact was not an obstacle but an invitation. Where historians must remain silent, the dramatist may speak. Where journalists are denied access, the imagination gains entry. Morgan’s genius was to understand that the very absence of any official record, meant he could write not what did happen, but what must have happened, including all the emotional and psychological truths, that are located beneath the constitutional surface.

Morgan’s history with royal drama, gave him unique qualifications for this task. His screenplay for “THE QUEEN” had already demonstrated his ability to imagine the private lives of public figures without descending into cheap sensationalism or hagiographic reverence. His stage play “FROST/NIXON” had proven his mastery of the duologue as a form of psychological combat. Now in THE AUDIENCE, he brings both skills to bear, creating a series of encounters that function simultaneously as historical pageant, character study, and a meditation on very the nature of power itself. The result is a play, that feels both epic and microscopic, sweeping across decades, while never losing sight of the human heartbeat at its centre.

ARCHITECTURE OF MEMORY, STRUCTURE AND FORM – The structural intelligence of THE AUDIENCE reveals itself only gradually, and this is one of its chief pleasures. A lesser playwright would have marched chronologically from Churchill to Cameron, giving each prime minister a dutiful scene and trusting the passage of time to provide dramatic shape. Morgan, by contrast, understands that memory does not move in straight lines. An elderly woman sitting alone in a palace room might find her mind drifting not forward but backward, sideways, diagonally across the years. Her eight-year-old self might suddenly appear, asking questions she has spent a lifetime learning not to answer. Her middle-aged self might flash before her, burdened with children and crises she could not possibly have anticipated. This temporal fluidity is not mere aesthetic showing-off, rather a profound insight into the way a life, of such extraordinary duration and a life of constraint which we must feel from the inside. The Queen has lived so long, has absorbed so much, that past and present must blur together, like watercolours running in the rain.

The play opens not with the young Elizabeth ascending the throne, but with her as an older woman, preparing for yet another audience. Already we are in the realm of ritual, of repetition, of a duty so ingrained it has become cellular. From there, Morgan vaults us through time with the assurance of a master dramatist. The eight-year-old Princess Elizabeth of York appears, innocent of the destiny that the abdication crisis will soon thrust upon her. We leap to Churchill, to Wilson, to Thatcher, and back again to a young Queen still learning the strange trade of monarchy. The effect is kaleidoscopic but never confusing, because the emotional through-line, the gradual accretion of wisdom, weariness, and quiet, unshakeable resolve, which remains perfectly clear. By the time the play reaches its final, reflective moments, we feel we have not so much watched a series of scenes as lived through a life.

This non-linear approach also allows Morgan to create thematic resonances that a chronological structure would obscure. The juxtaposition of Harold Wilson’s folksy warmth with Margaret Thatcher’s steely certainty, the echoing of John Major’s personal insecurities with Gordon Brown’s, the way childhood innocence haunts the corridors of old age, and all of this emerges organically from the play’s darting, circling structure. In its way, like a musical composition, with themes introduced, developed, reprised, and transformed across the evening’s duration.

HELEN MIRREN’S MONUMENTAL PERFORMANCE – Now we must speak of Helen Mirren. It is a name that will echo through theatre history, and her performance as Queen Elizabeth II across two media (film and stage) represents one of the singular achievements of contemporary acting. But to say that Mirren is merely “playing the Queen again” is to fundamentally misunderstand what she accomplishes here. Her film performance in The Queen was a masterpiece of contained emotion, a portrait of a woman navigating the peculiar crisis precipitated by the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Her stage performance as delivered during THE AUDIENCE is something richer, stranger, and technically more astonishing, as she plays Queen Elizabeth, across those sixty years, ageing before our eyes, plus not primarily through makeup, though Ivana Primorac’s wig designs, and the quick-change artistry of the costume department and via her three minions on the stage (those three ladies-in-waiting, all wearing black), fully deserve their own ovations. Helen Mirren through all the infinitely more subtle instruments of posture, gait, vocal timbre, plus the weight of accumulated experience, and which Mirren also makes visible in her eyes.

Watch the young Elizabeth of the early scenes. Helen Mirren holds herself with a slight, almost imperceptible rigidity, showing the physical manifestation of a woman who has not yet grown comfortable in her constitutional skin. Her movements are deliberate but unrelaxed, her voice pitched slightly higher, her responses to Churchill’s avuncular condescension tinged with a deference that she has not yet learned to transmute into the steelier stuff of regal composure. Now fast-forward, as the play so often does, to the Elizabeth of the Wilson years. The spine has settled into a more natural erectness, yet still proper, and yet still the product of a lifetime’s training, but no longer a conscious performance. The voice has dropped into a richer, more authoritative register. The eyes, crucially, have now begun to hold something back. This is the Queen Elizabeth who has learned that her power lies, not in what she says, but in what she withholds.

By the time we reach the Elizabeth of the Major era and beyond, Helen Mirren has introduced a subtle physical slowing. The Queen lowers herself into chairs with the care of someone who has done this particular motion tens of thousands of times and can no longer take the ease of it for granted. Her hands, gloved or bare, move with an economy born of decades. Mirren does more with her face, in a single blink, in a fractional tightening of the lips, a tiny adjustment of her spectacles, than most actors can convey with an entire soliloquy. When John Major informs the Queen that the Royal Yacht Britannia, that has been her floating refuge for decades, is to be decommissioned, Helen Mirren registers that loss with a stillness so profound, that it becomes the most eloquent grief imaginable. She does not cry. Queens do not cry, of course not where anyone can see. But the slight stiffening of her shoulders, the careful pause before she speaks, the way her voice manages to be perfectly level and yet somehow hollowed out from within, yes this is acting of a kind that redefines what this art form can achieve.

The on-stage costume changes, as effected by the three ladies-in-waiting, who quickly glide in and out with silent precision, have become one of the production’s most talked-about features. Helen Mirren exits as the young Queen in a nipped-waist 1950s dress and re-emerges, moments later, as the monarch of the 1970s in a turquoise ensemble and perfectly coiffed wig, the fast transformation having occurred, whist in the full view of everyone. Far from breaking the theatrical illusion, this unique Brechtian touch of theatrical style plus artistic philosophy, just fully deepens the theatrical illusion. Reminded that the British monarchy is, at some irreducible level, a performance, and that the Queen is constantly being dressed, prepared, and presented by a retinue of three female attendants (the ladies-in-waiting), that her public self is assembled just as carefully as any stage costume. The poignancy of this is immense. Here is a woman who has not dressed herself in private for decades, whose every appearance is a collaborative production. Helen Mirren’s willingness to let us see the machinery behind the magic speaks to her absolute confidence as a performer and her profound understanding of the character she inhabits.

There is a moment, late in the play, when the older Elizabeth converses with her younger selves. Multiple versions of the Queen occupy the stage simultaneously, and Helen Mirren’s performance finds its fullest expression in these scenes. She interrogates her past choices, questions her younger self’s certainties, and in a moment of almost unbearable intimacy, she admits to fears and doubts that the constitutional monarch can never voice aloud. The theatrical daring of this sequence, is matched only by its emotional impact. We are watching a woman in dialogue with her own conscience, and Mirren makes every word feel like a confession extracted at great cost.

THE GALLERY OF TWELVE PRIME MINISTERS – If Helen Mirren is the sun around which THE AUDIENCE orbits, the ensemble cast of prime ministers represents a solar system of remarkable richness. Each actor faces a daunting challenge, they must evoke a recognizable public figure, often in a single substantial scene, without tipping into caricature, while simultaneously holding their own against one of the finest stage actors of her generation. That so many succeed brilliantly, is a testament to the casting instincts of the production team and the skill of the performers themselves.

Richard McCabe’s Harold Wilson is, by any measure, one of the great supporting performances in recent theatrical memory. McCabe takes a prime minister often remembered (when he is remembered at all) for his pipe smoke and his raincoats and suspected MI5 plots, which transforms him into the emotional heart of the play. His Harold Wilson, arrives for his first audience radiating a nervous energy masked by Yorkshire bluffness, visibly uncertain whether the protocols of palace life will accommodate his plain-spoken, grammar-school origins. Helen Mirren’s Queen, initially reserved, is gradually disarmed by this unexpected warmth. Over multiple scenes spanning Wilson’s two terms in office, we watch a genuine relationship develop, but not exactly a friendship, for the constitutional gulf between them, can never ever be bridged, but there is something approaching mutual affection. The scene in which Wilson, his health failing and his political power waning, confesses his fears to the one person in British public life who can never betray him, is almost too moving to bear. McCabe plays it without a trace of self-pity, and Mirren receives the confidence with a compassion she cannot fully express. The result is a duet of extraordinary delicacy, and the silence that follows in the auditorium speaks volumes.

Haydn Gwynne’s Margaret Thatcher provides a necessary corrective to any temptation toward cosiness. Where Wilson’s warmth disarmed the Queen, Thatcher’s relentless certainty challenges her in an entirely different register. Gwynne’s physical transformation is remarkable, with the helmet of hair, the padded shoulders, the forward-leaning posture of a woman who has spent her career pushing against resistance, but the real triumph is vocal. She captures Thatcher’s unmistakable cadences without resorting to parody, locating the steely conviction beneath the mannered delivery. THE AUDIENCE between the Queen and Thatcher crackles with a tension, that is all the more potent for being so rigidly contained within the bounds of protocol. Both born in 1926, these are two women who are of exactly the same age, and whose visions of Britain, of womanhood, of power itself, could scarcely be more divergent. Morgan’s script gives them exchanges of exquisite passive aggression, and Daldry’s staging emphasizes the physical distance between them. They never touch. They barely approach each other. The temperature in the room seems to drop whenever they share the stage. And yet there is, beneath the frost, a grudging mutual recognition, each understands what it has cost the other to occupy her position.

Paul Ritter’s John Major deserves particular praise for locating the pathos beneath a political figure often dismissed as grey and unmemorable. Ritter plays Major as a man almost painfully aware of his own limitations, someone who has stumbled into the highest office without the armour of ideological certainty or charismatic self-belief. His confession to the Queen, that he feels out of his depth, that the job is beyond him, that he cannot understand why anyone would want it, yes is both darkly comic and genuinely touching. Ritter’s timing is impeccable, and the vulnerability he brings to the role invites an audience sympathy that takes us by surprise.

Edward Fox’s Winston Churchill, while a more traditional interpretation, provides the necessary historical anchor. His Churchill is the grand old man, the titan who bestrides the young Queen’s early reign like a colossus. Fox captures the required, and notably deep, rich, full-bodied orotund delivery, plus the mischievous glint, and also the sense of a man who has seen everything, and is faintly amused to still be around. Some critics have found his performance less revelatory than those of his cast-mates, and it is true that the Churchill scenes hew closer to received historical impressions than the more surprising portraits elsewhere. But there is value in this solidity, and Fox’s scenes with the young Queen establish the dynamic that will sustain the entire play, a sovereign learning her trade from a master politician, absorbing his wisdom while quietly developing her own.

Nathaniel Parker’s Gordon Brown, Rufus Wright’s David Cameron, Michael Elwyn’s Anthony Eden, and the rest of the company all contribute moments of distinction. Parker locates the wounded decency beneath Brown’s brooding public persona. Wright captures the gloss of Cameron’s easy confidence while hinting at the shallows beneath. Elwyn’s Eden is a study in the particular tragedy of a brilliant man undone by events, and by his own flaws, in a crisis that would reshape the post-imperial world. Every prime minister, however brief their stage time, is rendered with specificity and care.

THE YOUNG ELIZABETH AND THE THEATRE OF MEMORY – One of the most audacious and emotionally resonant elements of THE AUDIENCE is the frequent presence of the Young Elizabeth, a version of the Queen at various childhood ages, who appears in scenes interwoven throughout the main action. Played originally by the remarkable young actress, Nell Williams, this Elizabeth is not merely a flashback device but an active participant in the drama. She converses with her older self, questions her, challenges her. The effect is at once theatrical and deeply psychological, an externalization of all the internal dialogue, that must surely attend a life lived so entirely in the public gaze.

The young Elizabeth scenes do operate on multiple levels. At their most immediate, they provide the biographical context that helps us understand how a girl who was never meant to be the Queen, who was the daughter of a second son, quite comfortably distant from the throne, found herself suddenly thrust into the line of succession, via the seismic shock of her uncle’s abdication. The poignancy of these moments is immense. We watch a child being told that her future is not her own, that her life will be defined by a duty which she did not choose. We see the seeds of the adult Queen’s famous stoicism being planted in soil prepared by loss and obligation.

But the young Elizabeth scenes accomplish something more than exposition. They serve as a kind of dramatic conscience, a way for Morgan to give voice to the inner life that the adult Queen has spent a lifetime suppressing. When the older Elizabeth asks her younger self whether she made the right choices, whether the sacrifices were worth it, whether the crown has been a prison or a purpose, she is voicing questions that the real Queen, who is bound by constitution and by character alike, could never articulate publicly. The delicious theatrical daring of this conceit, is matched by its emotional effectiveness. By the end of the play, we feel that we have not merely observed a life, but have been granted access to its hidden chambers.

ART OF SET DESIGN WITH DALDRY, CROWLEY, PLUS THE VISUAL LANGUAGE OF POWER – Stephen Daldry’s direction, in concert with Bob Crowley’s set and costume design, Rick Fisher’s lighting, and the entire design team, creates a visual and spatial environment that is both elegant and loaded with meaning, and does provide an attractive production visually. Rick Fisher’s lighting carves the space with precision and restraint. The palette is cool, golds, creams, the deep blue of palace shadows. The actors are isolated into pools of light, emphasizing the essential solitude of power. When transitions occur, they happen with a fluidity that mirrors the script’s temporal leaps. Paul Englishby’s original music, plus Paul Arditti’s sound design, do complete the sensory picture, providing aural cues that do guide our emotional responses, without ever overwhelming them. The dominant set piece is the towering gilded wall, palace architecture wonderfully reduced to its essential symbolism. This golden wall, represents the British monarchy itself, also ancient, imposing, immutable. The human figures who come and go, the prime ministers with their brief tenures, the courtiers with their discreet footsteps, even the Queen herself with her mortal span, can seem fragile and transient. The institution endures, and the individuals pass.

Crowley’s set is a masterclass in theatrical economy. Furniture appears and disappears with silent precision, carried by male minions whose very structured movements, speak of centuries of protocol. There are no elaborate scene changes, no hydraulics, no turntables. The focus remains relentlessly on the actors and the words. Daldry trusts the material utterly, and his restraint is a form of confidence. He understands that the drama lies in the faces, the pauses, the stillness, the tiny shifts of power that no set piece could convey.

The costume design deserves its own extended appreciation. Crowley has created a series of outfits that track the Queen’s evolving style across six decades, while also facilitating the rapid changes that have become a signature of the production. The decision to effect these changes on stage, with Helen Mirren stepping behind a screen or being attended by her minions, her three ladies-in-waiting whilst in full view of everyone, is both practical and profound. It reminds us that the Queen is dressed by others, that her public presentation is a collaborative and constant labour. The wigs by Ivana Primorac are extraordinary, not just for their verisimilitude, but also for the speed with which they are applied / removed. This visible artifice becomes, paradoxically, a source of authenticity. We are watching a woman whose life is a performance, and we are being shown the backstage machinery.

DEPTHS OF POWER, DUTY, AND THE LONELINESS OF THE CROWN – THE AUDIENCE play, is on its surface, all about the relationship between Elizabeth II and her prime ministers. But its themes resonate far beyond the specific constitutional arrangement of the United Kingdom. At its core, this is a meditation on the nature of power itself, on the difference between the hard power of political office, and the soft power of permanence and symbolic authority.

The Queen, as the play repeatedly reminds us, has no political power. She cannot legislate, cannot veto, cannot advocate publicly. Her role, as defined by Walter Bagehot in his classic 1867 study “The English Constitution”, she is to be consulted, to encourage, and to warn. This is influence so soft as to be almost intangible, and yet the play suggests that it is real. Prime ministers come burdened with decisions that will affect millions of lives. They are tired, anxious, often lonely. Into THE AUDIENCE room, they bring their fears and their certainties, and they encounter a woman who has seen it all before, who has listened to their predecessors’ identical fears, identical certainties, and who offers not answers but attention. This attention the play argues, is itself a form of power. To be heard by someone who cannot use your words against you, who will never run for office, who will be there long after you have been defeated or retired or died, this is a unique gift that no other relationship in public life can offer.

The play is also a study in constraint, in the discipline of withholding. Queen Elizabeth II has spent her entire adult life not saying what she thinks. Imagine sitting through weekly meetings for sixty years, absorbing the confidences of twelve very different individuals, watching crises unfold that you are constitutionally forbidden to address publicly, and maintaining through all of it a composure that has become legendary. Helen Mirren’s performance makes us feel the cost of this discipline. Behind her attentive eyes, whole landscapes of opinion and emotion are being navigated. When she does speak, the words carry weight precisely because they have been so judiciously husbanded.

There is a political argument buried within the play, though Morgan is too subtle a writer to state it directly. The constitutional monarchy, for all its anachronistic features, provides a something that purely elected systems cannot, continuity. In a democracy, everything is up for grabs at every election. Policies reverse, alliances shift, the certainties of one decade become the embarrassments of the next. Amid all this flux, the Queen offers her fixed point, a human embodiment of the nation’s history and her identity transcends the partisan fray. Whether this is worth the price of hereditary privilege, is a question which the play leaves for its audience to debate. What it insists upon, is that the price is paid, every day, by the woman who wears the crown.

THE NTlive EXPERIENCE – BROADCASTING BRILLIANCE – However the NTlive format offers very enjoyable compensations, that even having the best seat in the Gielgud Theatre cannot provide. The multiple-camera coverage, directed with sensitivity and restraint, allows us to see details that would be invisible from the orchestra seats (the stalls). When Helen Mirren’s face fills the screen in close-up, when we can study the micro-expressions that flicker across her features, the precise moment when regal composures give way to private feelings, since we are being granted an intimacy that no live audience member could match. The broadcast also preserves a perfect document of incalculable value, Helen Mirren’s performance, McCabe’s Wilson, Gwynne’s Thatcher, all captured for posterity in a form that will forever outlast the original run.

The delicious 2013 video supplementary materials, which were originally shown during the interval, with creative team interviews, and some behind-the-scenes glimpses, are not offered as part of the encore cinema experience, but Youtube.com does have all the video.

The play provides fundamental generosity and warmth, toward its subject. Of course THE AUDIENCE is in many ways, a deeply sympathetic portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, and those who prefer their political drama with a sharper satirical edge, may dislike the warm tone. The Queen emerges as wise, patient, and fundamentally decent. A woman whose flaws (if any) are carefully elided. Accusing the play of excessive sympathy, perhaps is to misunderstand its dramatic project, since Morgan is writing fiction, and he is not writing investigative journalism, since he is writing a character study deeply rooted in educated speculation. Moreover the play’s warmth toward its subject, is balanced by its clear-eyed depiction of the cost of monarchy, the sacrificed childhood, the emotional repression, the peculiar loneliness of a life lived in perpetual performance. This is not hagiography, it is humanism.

OF THE CULTURAL MOMENT, AND “THE WHY” THE AUDIENCE RESONATES NOW – THE AUDIENCE premiered in 2013, during the early years of the second Elizabethan age’s final decade, and the play’s concerns have only grown more resonant with the passage of time. We are now living through a period of profound political turbulence, when faith in democratic institutions has eroded across the Western world, when prime ministers and presidents come and go with dizzying rapidity, when the very notion of stable, trustworthy leadership can seem almost quaint. Against this backdrop, the figure of a female monarch who has simply endured, who has shown up, week after week, decade after decade, performing a role whose meaning lies not in any single action, but in the accumulated weight of a lifetime’s service, which takes on a peculiar power.

The play does not argue for British monarchy as a political system. It does something subtler, it asks us to consider what is lost when institutions of continuity are swept away, when everything becomes provisional, when there is no fixed point around which a nation’s story can be organized. In an age of perpetual disruption, the idea of someone whose job is simply to listen, to remember, and to endure may strike us as either hopelessly anachronistic or unexpectedly profound, and yes perhaps both at once. THE AUDIENCE holds these possibilities in tension, and lets you decide.

MY PERSONAL CODA – Yes I have experienced THE AUDIENCE multiple times now, through the NTlive broadcast and the encores and AT HOME, and each viewing has revealed new layers, new details, new reasons for continued admiration. On first viewing, I was swept away by Mirren’s immaculate performance, and the theatrical audacity of the time-hopping structure. On second viewing, appreciated the inner intricacy of McCabe’s Wilson, the utter precision of Gwynne’s Thatcher, the quiet devastation of Ritter’s Major. On third viewing, I found myself attending more closely to the set design, to the way the lighting isolates and also defines, to the symbolic weight of that golden wall, to the balletic grace of the extremely fast on-stage costume transformations. The mark of a truly great work of art, is that it rewards each repeated encounter, plus each time allowing the unfolding of some new dimensions.

The play’s emotional impact does not diminish with familiarity. If anything, knowing precisely what is coming, makes certain moments more powerful. When Wilson begins to speak of his failing health, when Major must deliver news that wounds the Queen personally, when the older Elizabeth confronts her younger self with questions that have no easy answers, these scenes hit with undiminished force, because they tap into emotional truths that transcend their specific historical context. We may not be monarchs or prime ministers, but we all know something of duty, of sacrifice, of the gap between our public and private selves. THE AUDIENCE speaks to these universal experiences, through the specific and extraordinary circumstances of its protagonist, and in doing so, it becomes more than just a play about royalty. It becomes a play about all of us.

THE AUDIENCE COMMANDS THE FINAL VERDICT – Five Stars. THE AUDIENCE is that rarest of theatrical achievements, THE commercial smash that is also a work of profound artistry, a star vehicle that is also an ensemble triumph, a historical pageant that is also an intimate character study. Helen Mirren delivers a perfect performance, that will be studied by actors for generations. Peter Morgan’s script balances wit, pathos, and intellectual heft with a lightness of touch that belies its structural sophistication. Stephen Daldry’s direction, Bob Crowley’s design, and the entire creative team have constructed a world that is at once grand and intimate, formal and fluid, rooted in historical specificity and alive with contemporary resonance.

The National Theatre Live broadcast preserves this achievement with all the care that it deserves, ensuring that audiences around the world, those global world audiences who could never have secured one of the West End’s most coveted tickets, can experience something approaching the absolute magic of the original production. In a cultural landscape that often rewards the loud, the flashy, and the transient, THE AUDIENCE stands as a monument to restraint, to craft, to the quiet power of simply paying attention. A play about listening, and it demands that we listen in turn. To do so is to be rewarded beyond measure.

NTlive – THE AUDIENCE starring HELEN MIRREN – JUNE 2026 at AUSTRALIAN CINEMAS – If you have not yet seen NTlive’s THE AUDIENCE, then I urge you to quickly do so, at the earliest possible opportunity. If you have seen it, you already know why this review runs to such length. Some things, justly deserve to be fully celebrated without reservation, without qualification. NTlive’s THE AUDIENCE is emphatically an unreserved, unambiguous, wholehearted five stars ★★★★★ with the verdict delivered not with the weight of critical obligation, but with the lightness of genuine, abiding gratitude.

AUSTRALIAN CLASSIFICATION RATING = CTC

Original Venue: Gielgud Theatre, London, UK.
STARRING – Helen Mirren, Michael Elwyn, Haydn Gwynne, Edward Fox, Richard McCabe, Nathaniel Parker, Paul Ritter, Rufus Wright, David Peart, Geoffrey Beevers, Bebe Cave, Maya Gerber, Nell Williams, Harry Feltham, Matt Plumb, Spencer Kitchen, Jonathan Coote, Ian Houghton, Charlotte Moore
Directed by – Stephen Daldry
Playwright: Peter Morgan
Set and costume designer: Bob Crowley
Lighting designer: Rick Fisher
Music: Paul Englishby
Sound designer: Paul Arditti
Presented by – Matthew Byam Shaw, Robert Fox, Andy Harries.

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