Five talking points from Indhu Rubasingham's first National Theatre season
What will InRu's tenure on the South Bank involve? Does Ewan McGregor make a triumphant return to the stage? Who was snubbed in the Tony Award nominations? All in this week's Shouts and Murmurs.
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Previously in The Crush Bar:
Last Tuesday, Indhu Rubasingham revealed her first season as artistic director of the National Theatre.
You have probably read about it already, but if you haven’t, then all the details are here: sixteen new productions, including nine world premieres and the return of repertory theatre; a bunch of famous faces, including Paul Mescal, Nicola Coughlan, Letitia Wright, Lesley Manville and Stormzy; two new companies-in-residence in Barnsley’s LUNG Theatre and Hull’s Middle Child Theatre; two new transatlantic partnerships with The Shed and BAM in New York; and a new primary schools tour, co-produced with the Unicorn Theatre, to replace the one axed last year.
Show-wise, everything kicks off in September - after, and a bit alongside, the final productions programmed by Rufus Norris - with Rubasingham herself staging a new adaptation of Euripides’ Bacchae by Nima Taleghani in the Olivier Theatre - the first ever debut play in the theatre’s biggest auditorium - and Hamlet with Hiran Abeysekera, Sri Lankan star of Life Of Pi, in the Lyttelton, directed by Robert Hastie. After that, in December, comes a revival of JM Synge’s The Playboy Of The Western World starring Nicola Coughlan and Siobhan McSweeney in the Lyttleton.
Then, over 2026 and 2027, Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner will star in a revival of Les Liaisons Dangereuses directed by Marianne Elliot; Letitia Wright will appear in Clint Dyer’s revival of American playwright Tracey Scott Wilson’s The Story; Dominic Cooke will direct Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9; Ben Daniels will star in a revival of Terence Rattigan’s Man and Boy directed by Anthony Lau; Miranda Cromwell will stage a new play by Winsome Pinnock called The Authenticator; Rubasingham will direct Anupama Chandrasekhar’s new version of The Jungle Book; playwright Carmen Nasr will make her NT debut with Samira; Matthew Warchus will stage a musical adaptation of the movie Pride; Punchdrunk and Stormzy will be involved somehow; and, perhaps most eye-catchingly, Paul Mescal will lead a repertory company in revivals of Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman and Tom Murphy’s A Whistle In The Dark, directed by Rebecca Frecknall and Caitriona McLaughlin respectively. Phew.
National Theatre season announcements tend to be big moments when commentators ask big questions about the nation’s flagship theatre, what its for, and where its going, and David Hare complains about there not being enough classic plays on its stages in The Guardian. This announcement feels like a particularly significant one - partly because it is huge, partly because it is Rubasingham’s first, and partly because it is the first season in the NT’s history that has not been overseen by a white man - and, as such, it has prompted an avalanche of discussion. Here are five talking points…
The International Theatre
Announcing her season, Rubasingham said that she wanted to “bring the world to our stages and share our work around the world”, that she was less interested in “state-of-the-nation plays” than she was in “state-of-the-world plays”, and that she was keen to collaborate with stars from the Nollywood and Bollywood film industries. The Stage’s Alistair Smith has observed how this international intent runs through her season.
This has, predictably, already led to some grumbling - including this odd piece in The Spectator by Jawad Iqbal, who cannot comprehend what the words '“international reach” mean - but the truth is that the National Theatre is now the International Theatre. Thanks to the introduction of NTLive in 2009 and NT at Home in 2020, the theatre’s reach has exploded - it now reaches 28 million people in 184 countries - and revenue from those services represents a significant income stream. The boss of the NT no longer only has to worry about satisfying audiences at home, they have to think about satisfying audiences around the world that experience the NT’s shows via screens as well. How well Rubasingham walks that tightrope will define her tenure.
Seeing stars
Paul Mescal! Monica Barbaro! Lesley Manville! Aidan Turner! Letitia Wright! Nicola Coughlan! Siobhan McSweeney! James McArdle! Ben Daniels! And, if Deadline’s Baz Bamgboye is to be believed, possibly Colman Domingo and Jeremy Strong! Indhu Rubasingham’s first season is full of big names and there will be more to come.
What makes that list particularly exciting is that there is not a Hollywood ego in sight: they are all either established actors with plenty of stage experience or rising stars who want to work in subsidised theatre. They are not the only exciting creatives Rubasingham has lined up, either. She has also assembled an impressive array of directors - Rebecca Frecknall, Dominic Cooke, Marianne Elliot, Matthew Warchus - and roped in immersive pioneers Punchdrunk to make a new piece of work in the Dorfman in 2027. Oh, and Stormzy has signed up to do something as well. Attracting big names to the South Bank is a key part of running the NT. This is a great start.
Collaborating with companies
Amid the Mescal-induced excitement, it was easy to miss a few less flashy announcements: Nima Taleghani’s Bacchae will tour to secondary schools in a slimmed-down version; a new primary schools touring partnership with The Unicorn Theatre will see an adaptation of Piers Torday’s The Last Wild by Jude Christian travel around the country in 2027; and two regionally-based companies - Barnsley’s brilliant verbatim outfit LUNG Theatre and Hull’s galvanising gig-theatre company Middle Child Theatre - have been made the companies-in-residence for the next two years.
The commitment to taking theatre into schools is commendable, particularly at a time when the arts are being excised from the curriculum and particularly following the NT’s scandalous axing of its previous primary schools touring programme last year. I am most excited by LUNG Theatre and Middle Child Theatre getting the recognition and support they deserve, though. These innovative, ethical companies have been responsible for some of my favourite shows - Trojan Horse, Who Cares, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything - and I am confident that some of the most thrilling work of Rubasingham’s NT will emerge from those collaborations. The NT has often felt a world away from the bold, boundary-breaking work done outside London by companies like LUNG and Middle Child. Hopefully that changes under Rubasingham.
Radical revivals
This is a perennial problem for bosses of the NT: programme too many classic plays and there will be complaints that you are not doing enough to support new writing; programme too few and people will moan about you not respecting the repertoire. Lyn Gardner has observed that Rubasingham’s first season places “a very strong emphasis on classics” with revivals making up seven of the 14 plays announced. Is this a reflection that famous actors are more attracted to recognisable titles? Is it a reflection that classic plays do better with the NT’s global audience? Is it both?
Is it a problem? Is the NT kowtowing to its conservative critics? Is Rubasingham not being radical enough? Perhaps, but there are other ways of being radical without programming new plays. You can get exciting writers to adapt classic texts. You can get directors to stage them in innovative ways. You can mess around with the casting. All of this is already evident in Rubasingham’s first season and I have a hunch that it might be her approach: programme familiar titles to silence the traditionalist chuntering - see also: the tentative return of rep in 2027 - then let some bold artists loose on them. Might this be what Rubasingham means by “the modern mainstream”
A change in tone
I was not at the NT press conference but WhatsOnStage editor Alex Wood and critic Sarah Crompton were, and on The WhatsOnStage Podcast, they note how the atmosphere felt compared to previous press conferences at the NT.
“It just had a sense of relaxation and celebration, which was noticeably different, I think, from press conferences under Indhu’s two predecessors,” Crompton says. “Rufus was very open but quite anxious. Nicholas was a brilliant career diplomat with an answer for everything… Indhu is very open, but she also laughs at herself.”
“It all felt incredibly amicable, but also that everyone in the room was fighting the same fight and on the same team,” Wood agrees. “It didn’t feel adversarial… it was all about ‘congratulations for some excellent programming’ and ‘let’s celebrate you as a dynamic and exciting force for UK theatre and world theatre.’”
It is true that there is a huge amount of support and goodwill for Rubasingham at the moment - partly because she is the first female boss in the organisation’s history and partly because she is an incredibly popular figure within the industry - and a distinct sense of enthusiasm around her new season. Running the NT is perhaps the most difficult job in theatre, though. When things go wrong, on stage and off stage, as they inevitably will at some point, it will be Rubasingham that comes under fire. She is just starting her honeymoon period in post. It will be interesting to see how long it lasts.
In other news: Brendan Gleeson will star in Conor McPherson’s The Weir in the West End this Autumn; the Saville Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue is set to be redeveloped as a home for Cique du Soleil; a new comedy by John Niven about Oasis vs Blur will tour in 2026; Hannah Dodd and Rob Madge will take over in Cabaret at the end of May; Daniel Casey will play Inspector Tom Barnaby in the forthcoming Midsomer Murders tour; full casting for Jamie Lloyd’s Evita has been revealed; Bertie Carvel will play Leontes with the Royal Shakespeare Company; the Tony Award nominations were revealed; eight touring shows are being supported via a £2m Arts Council England pilot scheme; the Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland are introducing a new award for pantos; Paul W Fleming has been re-elected general secretary of Equity.