Michael Frayn is one of the great playwrights of our time with international hit plays including Copenhagen, Democracy, Noises Off and Donkeys' Years. Afterlife is his first new play for the National since the 2003 hit and West End transfer, Democracy. The play is presented in the vast Lyttelton auditorium of the National Theatre from June 2008. Donkeys' Years was revived and toured the UK in 2007 (30 years after its premiere) with sales of the Modern Play edition reaching 1000 copies. The play will benefit from the NT's mass publicity and events organised around the production.

Afterlife is Michael Frayn's first new play for the National Theatre since Democracy, which premiered at the National in 2003 before West End and Broadway transfers. Afterlife opens in the NT Lyttelton in June. Investigating the life of the Austrian impresario and founder of the Salzburg Festival, Max Reinhardt, Afterlife is a grand epic and a highly theatrical work that will be directed by Frayn's long-term collaborator Michael Blakemore. With his morality play 'Everyman', Reinhardt captivated first the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg, and then the city itself, with the play opening the Salzburg festival each year from 1920 until the accession of the Nazis in 1938. As Reinhardt and his company are forced into exile, 'Everyman' is taken to America until life imitates art and Death comes for first Reinhardt's master of ceremonies and chief associate, Kommer, and then for Reinhardt himself.