| Britain's only national theatre company dedicated to new work by new writers from the UK and around the world.
It presents work at two venues at Sloane Square in London, and has also staged productions in New York, Sydney, Brussels, Toronto and Dublin. It opened in 1956 with George Devine as its first artistic director, who wanted to develop contemporary writers. His policy created a new generation of British playwrights, dubbed "Angry Young Men," as John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Edward Bond, and others began to write on contemporary social issues. International writers were represented too, with some of Britain's first productions of work by
Bertolt Brecht, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre and Marguerite Duras.
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