At a moment when the world's fractures feel both ancient and newly urgent, the National Theatre has announced a 2027 season built around eight world premieres — stories of political rupture, identity, and reconciliation drawn from the Arab Spring, post-apartheid South Africa, the Caribbean, and Britain's own European crossroads. James Graham returns to the parliamentary stage with a portrait of John Major's unlikely rise to power, while the season as a whole signals a deliberate turn away from canonical certainty toward original, internationally-minded storytelling. The absence of Shakespeare