The World's
Greatest
Plays
Theatre's essential canon — ranked by monthly views
This month's top 3
The full list
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1Dramatic Comedy
Marx in Soho: A Play on History
A furious, funny and unexpectedly human solo play that drags Karl Marx out of history books and drops him directly into the chaos of modern life.
39 views -
2Tragedy
Death and the King’s Horseman
A thrilling and devastating play about duty, colonial violence and spiritual responsibility that still feels dangerously alive.
24 viewsWatch -
3Morality Play
Everyman
A strange, powerful medieval drama that strips a human life down to its essentials and asks what, if anything, remains when death arrives.
22 views -
4Dramatic Comedy
The Cherry Orchard
A quietly heartbreaking masterpiece about people watching their world disappear in real time. Funny, delicate and far more savage than its reputation suggests.
22 viewsWatch -
5Epic Theatre
The Good Person of Szechwan
A brilliant, unsettling play that asks one impossible question with complete clarity: how do you remain good in a society that punishes kindness at every turn?
22 views -
617th Century
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare’s most joyful play becomes stranger and wiser with age, a romantic comedy that understands how irrational love can feel and how fragile happiness really is.
21 views -
7Tragedy
The Glass Menagerie
A fragile, piercing memory play about love, shame and escape that captures the sadness of family life with almost unbearable precision.
21 viewsWatch -
8Epic Theatre
Mother Courage and Her Children
A furious, darkly funny anti war play that strips conflict down to money, survival and human compromise with terrifying clarity.
20 viewsWatch -
9Tragedy
A Streetcar Named Desire
A feverish, devastating portrait of desire, class and self deception that still feels dangerous every time it is performed.
19 viewsWatch -
1019 viewsWatch
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11Social Realism
A Doll’s House
A play that changed theatre forever by asking a terrifyingly simple question: what happens when a woman decides her own life matters more than the role she has been assigned?
18 viewsWatch -
12Tragedy
Antigone
An unnervingly modern tragedy about political power, moral conviction and the terrible cost of refusing to bend.
18 viewsWatch -
13Tragedy
Hamlet
Possibly the greatest play ever written about grief, paralysis and the terrifying difficulty of knowing what the right thing actually is.
17 views -
14Political Theatre
The Crucible
A furious and frightening play about fear, power and public shame that still feels dangerously close to the modern world.
17 viewsWatch -
15Tragedy
Death of a Salesman
A brutal, compassionate portrait of a man destroyed by the dream he spent his life chasing, and still one of the greatest plays ever written about work, masculinity and failure.
16 viewsWatch -
16Noh Theatre
Dōjōji
A hypnotic theatrical ghost story where jealousy becomes sacred terror and every movement feels charged with centuries of emotion.
16 viewsWatch -
17Musical Theatre
Hamilton
A thrilling reinvention of the historical musical that turns the founding of America into a story about ambition, legacy and the unbearable pressure to matter.
16 viewsWatch -
18Tragedy
King Lear
A terrifying study of power, ageing and human cruelty that strips civilisation down to the bone and somehow finds tenderness there too.
16 viewsWatch -
19Dramatic Comedy
Man and Superman
Shaw's longest, most argumentative and most exhilarating play — a romantic comedy about a man running from a woman, wrapped around a philosophical debate between Don Juan and the Devil.
15 viewsWatch -
20Tragedy
Othello
A terrifying study of jealousy, manipulation and prejudice that turns intimate human weakness into full scale tragedy with unbearable precision.
15 views -
21Tragedy
The Bacchae
A savage and hypnotic tragedy about repression, ecstasy and the terrifying consequences of believing reason alone can control human nature.
15 views -
22Dramatic Comedy
The Misanthrope
A razor sharp comedy about the exhausting performance of social life and the danger of demanding absolute honesty from a world built on politeness.
15 views -
23Social Realism
The Seagull
A beautiful and painfully funny play about artistic failure, unreturned love and the terrible gap between the lives people dream of and the lives they actually live.
15 viewsWatch -
24Dramatic Comedy
The Visit
A viciously funny moral nightmare about money, justice and the terrifying ease with which ordinary people learn to excuse cruelty.
15 views -
25Tragedy
Medea
A furious, terrifying tragedy that forces an audience to sit inside betrayal, grief and revenge with absolutely nowhere to hide.
14 viewsWatch -
26Romantic Comedy
Cyrano de Bergerac
A thrilling romantic comedy about wit, pride and longing that somehow feels intimate even at its most theatrical.
13 viewsWatch -
27Tragedy
Doctor Faustus
A thrilling and unsettling play about ambition, vanity and the terror of realising too late that knowledge cannot save you from yourself.
13 views -
28Tragedy
Oedipus Rex
A terrifyingly precise tragedy about knowledge, power and the human need to believe we control our own lives.
13 viewsWatch -
29Romantic Comedy
The Merchant of Venice
A brilliant and deeply uncomfortable play about prejudice, money and power whose greatest strength lies in its refusal to offer easy moral certainty.
13 views -
30Dramatic Comedy
Top Girls
A furious, brilliant play about ambition, feminism and the price women pay for success inside systems that were never built for them.
13 viewsWatch -
31Tragedy
Romeo and Juliet
A play everyone thinks they already know until they see how violent, funny, reckless and emotionally overwhelming it actually is.
12 viewsWatch -
32Dramatic Comedy
Tartuffe
A razor sharp comedy about hypocrisy, vanity and the dangerous pleasure of believing exactly what you want to hear.
12 views -
33Dramatic Comedy
Lysistrata
A filthy, furious anti war comedy that still feels shockingly alive more than two thousand years after it was written.
11 views
