National TheatreWinner of the STR Theatre Book Prize 2014

The National Theatre Story is filled with artistic, financial and political battles, onstage triumphs – and the occasional disaster.

This definitive account takes readers from the National Theatre’s 19th-century origins, through false dawns in the early 1900s, and on to its hard-fought inauguration in 1963. At the Old Vic, Laurence Olivier was for ten years the inspirational Director of the NT Company, before Peter Hall took over and, in 1976, led the move into the National’s concrete home on the South Bank.