Bulgakov & Boucicault at National in New Year???

Look out for some classic revivals at the National Theatre in the new year. Amongst the new programme highlights that we hear are on the cards are productions of Dion Boucicault’s 1841 English comedy London Assurance, starring Fiona Shaw and Simon Russell Beale and directed by NT artistic director Nicholas Hytner, and an adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s banned 1926 Russian novel The White Guard, with a cast including Conleth Hill.

The White Guard, which was previously turned into the play The Days of the Turbins that was also banned, follows the fortunes of the Turbin family from 1918, as the opposing forces in the Russian civil war and the Ukrainian peasants fight over the city of Kiev. Bulgakov’s 1928 epic Flight, about the exodus of White Russian émigrés after the war, was stage at the NT in 1998.