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It is rare in the arts world for a major appointment to be greeted with universal acclaim. But the announcement that Indhu Rubasingham is to succeed Rufus Norris as the artistic director of the Royal National Theatre in 2025 has been met with delight, within the industry and without.
Colleagues at the Kiln theatre in Brent, where Rubasingham has been director since 2012, have joined with commentators in describing her as inspiring, compassionate, risk-taking, visionary and — crucially — tough. Norris has called her “an exceptional artist who I respect and admire hugely”. Playwright Roy Williams says: “With every fibre of her being, she adores theatre.”
Rubasingham may be the NT’s first female artistic director and the first person of colour in the role but she owes her appointment to her own track record. From a theatre boasting just 292 seats she has commissioned and created productions of international quality — there has been Florian Zeller’s astounding trilogy The Father, The Mother and The Son, and her production of Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden, which transferred to the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University and to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. This followed another notable West End and transatlantic hit with Moira Buffini’s Handbagged (a sharp, funny meeting between Margaret Thatcher and the Queen), which moved up the scale to Shaftesbury Avenue’s Vaudeville Theatre and a UK tour before conquering New York, at 59E59, and Washington DC’s Round House Theatre. A recent success is Ryan Calais Cameron’s remarkable McCarthy-era civil rights story Retrograde.
The question is whether she can match up to the NT’s string of hits, which have bounced regularly back from the West End to Broadway and beyond, earning precious revenue in the process — among them War Horse, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and The Lehman Trilogy.
Her professional trajectory shows an acute eye for new talent as well as an evident passion for finding diverse voices. Taking over what was then the Tricycle theatre in 2012, Rubasingham masterminded a multimillion-pound revamp, renamed the venue and pushed through its transformation into a significant player on London’s theatre scene. These evident management abilities will verify important since in her new role, she will also be the NT’s co-CEO, alongside Kate Varah.
Born in 1970 in Sheffield to a Tamil Sri Lankan family, she studied drama at the University of Hull. Afterwards, with a bursary from the Arts Council, she began work as an assistant director to Mike Leigh at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, then one of the country’s most important crucibles of new drama. Over the next decade or more, her work spanned several of the UK’s most interesting theatres: the Gate Theatre, the Young Vic, the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. At the Royal Court’s international department, she worked with another of her mentors, Elyse Dodgson, bringing on new playwriting voices from across the world.
Rubasingham is no National Theatre newbie: as Norris says, “it’s a place she knows well, having directed successfully in each of the three theatres”. However, it’s a big leap from the 292 seats of the Kiln to the challenges of the National, which boasts three full theatres — with a combined seating capacity 2,450 — plus outreach, educational and digital programmes. These include streaming services to cinemas, homes and schools.
All this has to be delivered against a backdrop of the most extreme financial curbs since the NT was founded by Laurence Olivier in 1963. Today, any director of a national arts institution in the UK faces a bumpy ride, with decreased funding and increased expectations, plus the financial black hole left by the pandemic closures (in the case of the NT, this amounts to some £80mn). To March of this year, against an NT expenditure of £91mn, the Arts Council of England grant provided £16.7mn: the rest has to be made up from ticket sales and a range of other revenue streams. In that same month the NT released a statement revealing it will need to “reduce activity levels in order to ensure financial stability” for the next three to four years.
Nicholas Hytner, the NT’s director from 2003 to 2015, underlines the difficulties, admitting the job has become a lot harder since his tenure. “The challenges are much more extreme,” he says. “I came in at a time of great optimism and increased funding. Since 2010 it’s become ever more difficult. Funding has been drastically reduced. The National Theatre, appreciate everyone else, is required to use a large chunk of its funding on education, community work, participation, outreach — all absolutely essential and good, but ACE appears to be conspicuously less interested than it was in artists, both established and those starting out.”
Rubasingham, by contrast, is all about the artists: the playwrights and actors and many other creative talents who make her theatre what it is. That’s the special talent she brings to this post. She herself has described it as “the best job in the world”; Hytner — not an easy man to please — calls her “a terrific appointment”. Watch this space.
