in Consent at the National Theatre
© Alastair Muir
024 – Consent, by Nina Raine
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Nina Raine’s play Consent opens with two middle-class couples enjoying a housewarming party. They are metropolitan professionals; comfortable, even smug in their privileged personal and professional lives. So far so familiar. As it happens for three of these characters their profession is the law, and they are soon discussing details of their current cases including stories of murder and rape. The barristers talk about their clients and their crimes in a casual, superior way, believing that the behaviour of their clients is a world away from their own. What we will soon see, however, is that the motives and morals of these self-satisfied elite are not so far from that of their criminal clients – they too can allow their cruder instincts to compel them to cross a line of honour or even of the law.
In charting the fallout of the infidelities of these couples in parallel with a brutal rape case that the lawyers are contesting, Consent explores some of the most charged issues of our time: the sources of sexual betrayal and violence, the ambiguities of consent, and the failings of the justice system to account proportionally or sensitively with cases of sexual abuse. At a moment when media coverage of the threat of male aggression towards women is challenging us to look again at how to address this endemic personal and social scourge, the play could not be more relevant.
Consent premiered at the National Theatre in 2017, before transferring to London’s West End a year later. It is now available to watch at any time on the National Theatre’s At Home on subscription or to rent.
I am delighted and honoured to be joined in this episode by the author of Consent, Nina Raine, and by actor Adam James, who appeared in the National’s production in the role of Jake.
Nina Raine is both a playwright and a director. Having earned a first-class degree in English literature at Oxford, she began her theatrical career as a trainee director at the Royal Court Theatre. Her directing credits since include Shades by Alia Bano at the Royal Court, April de Angelis’s Jumpy at the Royal Court and in the West End, and William Boyd’s Chekhov adaptation Longing at the Hampstead Theatre.
Her first play, Rabbit, which she also directed, premiered at the Old Red Lion theatre in 2006 before transferring to Trafalgar Studios that year, and to New York in 2007 winning her two awards as Most Promising Playwright. Her second play Tribes, about a deaf boy raised in a dysfunctional Jewish family, opened at the Royal Court in 2010. Productions in Melbourne and New York followed. Her next play Tiger Country was commissioned by Hampstead Theatre in 2011, before Consent in 2017. Her play, Stories, which tells the funny and poignant story of a 40-year-old single woman searching for a partner with whom to have a baby was produced at the National Theatre in 2018.
Recommended Play
Nina recommended The Effect by Lucy Prebble.
Adam James
Adam James is one of the most recognised actors working in Britain today, with an extensive list of credits on both stage and screen. His most prominent stage appearances in addition to Consent, include two of Mike Bartlett’s plays, Bull at the Young Vic, and King Charles III at the Almeida and in the West End, both of which transferred to New York, where Adam received the Clarence Derwent Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as the Prime Minister in the Broadway production of King Charles III. Other stage appearances include Shipwreck at the Almeida, Girl from the North Country in the West End and another award-winning performance in New York in The Pride.
Adam’s lengthy list of screen credits includes some of the most popular and esteemed titles on TV, including Band of Brothers, Ashes to Ashes, Doctor Who, Grantchester, King Charles III, Belgravia, Life and Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You. His films include Road to Guantanamo, Mother of Tears and Johnny English III.
Recommended Play
Adam recommended The Seven Streams of the River Ota by Robert Lepage.
The Footnotes to our episode on Nina Raine’s play Consent include observations on the ritualised performance of barristers in the courtroom, the resonances of Greek tragedy in the characters’ modern-day dramas, and the epistemology of intent or how they don’t know why they do what they do.
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115 – The Dance of Death by August Strindberg
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August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death is set in a remote army base on the coast of Sweden, where an army captain and his wife are trapped together in an unhappy marriage. The captain, bitter at his lack of promotion, and his wife, frustrated at having been forced to give up her career as an actress, occupy their empty hours tearing into each other in a brutal dance of mutual cruelty.
Strindberg’s scorching portrait of marital strife was written in 1900, but has had a lasting influence. Arthur Miller dubbed Strindberg, “the mad inventor of modern theatre”, and echoes of his unflinching dissection of marital discord can be seen in the plays of Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and John Osborne.
Sir Richard Eyre adapted and directed a wonderful production of Dance of Death at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond upon Thames earlier this year, and I am delighted that Sir Richard joins me in this episode to guide us through Strindberg’s blistering onslaught on marriage.
114 – Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare
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William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost is described on the title page in the first publication of its text in 1598 as “A Pleasant Conceited Comedie.” I imagine that the epithets were intended to highlight the play’s courtly aesthetic, its frothy merry-go-round of courtship, and above all perhaps, its ostentatiously intricate word play. For it is a play rich in the love and perils of language.
I am joined to assay Shakespeare’s conceited comedy by the Artistic Director of the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond upon Thames, Tom Littler. In the summer of 2026 Tom adapted and directed a magical double bill of Shakespeare, producing Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing in repertory, and staging them both ‘en plein air’.
113 – Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
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Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia, is viewed by many as his finest play, renowned for the breadth of its intellectual interrogations and its formal invention. The play is a structural masterpiece of ideas, as well as a teasing detective story, joyous comedy, and emotionally rich exploration of love and loss.
As we record this episode a wonderful new production of Arcadia is playing at the Duke of York’s theatre in London’s West End, following its acclaimed run at the Old Vic theatre earlier this year. I am delighted to share the challenge and the pleasure of exploring Stoppard’s dazzling drama with the director of the new production, Carrie Cracknell.
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