BBC Four has launched a dedicated season of post-war British and Irish theatre, making 16 filmed stage productions available on BBC iPlayer from Sunday 26 July 2026, with television broadcasts beginning the same evening at 10pm on BBC Four (WhatsOnStage).

The first broadcast was Samuel Beckett's Not I, introduced by Billie Whitelaw in a 1990 archive segment. The full collection — 16 plays plus accompanying documentary profiles — spans seven decades of playwriting, with themes of class, identity, race, gender and social change running across the season.

The line-up covers considerable ground. Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey and Alan Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular sit alongside J.B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls and Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party. Caryl Churchill's Top Girls and Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea are included, as are John Osborne's The Entertainer and Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood. The season reaches into newer work too: Kwame Kwei-Armah's Elmina's Kitchen, David Ireland's Cyprus Avenue, and Debbie Tucker Green's Salt. Military drama comes from Gregory Burke's Black Watch, and political documentary theatre from John McGrath's The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil. Kevin Elyot's My Night with Reg and Michael Frayn's Copenhagen round out the list.

Several of these archive productions have not been seen on television since their original transmissions. The Entertainer, Top Girls, My Night with Reg, Absurd Person Singular and A Taste of Honey all returned to screens for the first time in years as part of the season.

A handful of familiar faces provide introductions. Miranda Richardson presents An Inspector Calls. Bill Paterson introduces The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil. Michael Frayn opens his own Copenhagen, and Siân Phillips provides remarks for Under Milk Wood.

The documentary programming alongside the plays features interviews and profiles on eight writers: John Osborne, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, Kwasi Kwei-Armah, J.B. Priestley, Dylan Thomas, Shelagh Delaney and John McGrath. Together the documentaries and plays sketch a connected history — from the kitchen-sink realism of the late 1950s through to confrontational twenty-first-century work.

For anyone who has never caught these plays in a theatre, the iPlayer collection puts them in one place. For those who have, it is a rare chance to see archive recordings that have spent years off air.