By JILL LAWLESS | Associated Press Writer

Britain's National Theatre announced Wednesday it will beam live performances to movie theaters around the world in a bid to widen its audience and test the public's appetite for watching stage plays onscreen.

The first of four planned simulcasts will be a June 25 performance of Jean Racine's tragedy "Phedre" starring Academy Award-winning actress Helen Mirren and "Mamma Mia" heartthrob Dominic Cooper.

Artistic director Nicholas Hytner said Mirren, who won a best actress Oscar for "The Queen," was "tremendously excited" by the idea.



The performance will be broadcast live by satellite to 50 British cinemas, and will be shown within 24 hours at another 100 movie theaters in countries including the United States and Canada. Tickets in Britain will cost about 10 pounds ($15).

The three other plays have yet to be chosen.

New York's Metropolitan Opera has run a successful series of live broadcasts for years, but Hytner said trying it with plays — where the immediacy and intimacy of the acting are often crucial — was a gamble.

"There's a danger it might feel theatrical in all the wrong ways," he said. "We simply don't know.

"Somebody's got to try this, and if somebody's got to try it, it has to be us," Hytner told reporters at a news conference to announce the theater's 2009 season.



Britain's flagship state-funded theater has enjoyed a run of highly successful seasons since Hytner took the helm in 2003, transferring several hits, including Alan Bennett's "The History Boys," to Broadway and broadening its audience through a competitive ticket-pricing policy.

The company so far has weathered the economic downturn — Hytner said attendance was 93 percent in the second half of 2008. He said the National would continue to take artistic risks, despite the recession.

"I wouldn't know how to play safe," Hytner said. "Playing dangerous, keeping grit always in the oyster, seems to me to be absolutely essential here. We've got to go on trying to be as ambitious as we can."



New productions for 2009 include a still-untitled new play by Bennett that features an imaginary late-life meeting between poet W.H. Auden and composer Benjamin Britten. There is also a play for young people based on Terry Pratchett's fantastical novel "Nation," set on a desert island after a devastating tsunami.

Hytner said the National also will mount a stage adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's "extraordinarily prescient" 1990s novel "The Black Album," which centers on a London student torn between artistic hedonism and militant Islam.