The production reunites the playwright with director Michael Blakemore and actor Roger Allam, who previously collaborated on Frayn's Democracy, also first seen at the National in 2003 before transferring to the West End. Frayn and Blakemore also collaborated on Copenhagen at the National.

Allam plays Max Reinhardt, the legendary theatrical impresario, who each year at the Salzburg Festival directed a famous morality play, Everyman, about God sending Death to summon a representative of mankind for judgment. The victim he chooses is a man who, like Reinhardt, rejoices in his wealth and all the pleasures that money can buy. Then in 1938 Hitler declares his own day of reckoning and sends Death into Austria - whereupon Reinhardt, a Jew, is left as naked and vulnerable as Everyman himself. Afterlife is the story of how Reinhardt achieves his great ambition, though in a way he can scarcely have foreseen.

Allam was most recently seen on the London stage in the original production of Boeing-Boeing. Other credits at the National Theatre include The Cherry Orchard, Albert Speer, Summerfolk, Money (Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actor) and Troilus and Cressida. Other West End theatre credits include Blackbird, Aladdin and Privates on Parade (Olivier Award for Best Actor). His TV and film credits include "The Queen," "The Thick of It," "The Wind That Shakes the Barley," "A Class Apart" and "Spooks."

Also in the cast are David Burke (last seen at the NT in Frayn's Copenhagen), Abigail Cruttenden, Peter Forbes, Glyn Grain, Selina Griffiths and David Schofield.

For tickets contact the box office at 020 7452 3000 or visit www.nationaltheatre.org.uk.