Letitia Wright, Cate Blanchett and Sandra Oh participate in performances at the National Theater | National Theater

Cate Blanchett, Sandra Oh and Letitia Wright will form part of the National Theater’s star-studded, female-led line-up for a 2026 season that its artistic director has promised will “explode theatrically”.

Oh, the star of Killing Eve and Grey’s Anatomy, makes her debut at the National Theater in an adaptation of Molière’s social satire The Misanthrope, directed by the theater’s director and joint chief executive, Indu Rubasingham.

Academy Award winner Cate Blanchett and German actress Nina Hoss lead an experimental blend of the Sophocles myth of Electra and Ingmar Bergman’s classic film about a silent actress and her psychiatric nurse Persona, in one performance directed by Benedict Andrews.

British stars Wright, Lesley Manville and Francesca Mills are also part of the line-up.

Wright leads Tracy Scott Wilson’s newsroom thriller The Story, directed by Clint Dyer; Manville joins Lyttleton’s adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses in the spring. Mills stars in The Rise and Fall of Little Voice, which opens in December.

Big names could leave The National vulnerable to accusations of casting, which Nadine Rennie, co-president of the Casting Directors Guild, said was “killing” the industry by making life difficult for mid-sized theaters and destroying “audience minds.”

But Rubassingham, the first woman and first person of color to be appointed head of the National Theatre, has made no secret of her intention to create an agenda-setting program that puts homeless people proudly on seats.

Rubasingham grew up in Mansfield and went to the University of Hull to study drama before making her name at the Killen Theatre, where her program included Florian Zeller’s Family Trilogy, Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet and Zadie Smith’s Chaucer adaptation of The Willesden Wife.

She told an interviewer shortly after she got the job at the National that she wasn’t as “terrified” of the position as she was when she started at the oven.

“There’s a feeling that I’ve done the job,” she said. “Yes, it’s much bigger, but the principles are the same. I have to do shows that sell tickets. I have to have a story.”

The story she’s telling at The National seems to be one of a bold, innovative theatrical unafraid to court big names and take risks by putting someone like Oh, who recently made her operatic debut at the Met in New York at the Met and was playing Olivia in Twelfth Night at the Delacorte in Central Park, on its stages.

“From bold new voices to international collaborators, this is a year that celebrates the full range of talent on our stages and behind the scenes,” said Rubasingham. “It is an honor to showcase work that explodes theatrically, surprises us, and challenges us to see the world anew.”

“Bringing this range of delightful performances to audiences in the UK and around the world is what the National Theater is all about.”

War Horse, which premiered in 2007 and has toured extensively, will also return to the Southbank in May with a show at the Olivier Theater as it approaches its 20th anniversary.

There will also be two transfers to Broadway with Robert Hastie’s “Hamlet” and Alexander Zeldin’s “The Other Place” trying their luck on this side of the Atlantic.