Finally, some good news. While the rest of the world seems to be making all the wrong decisions, the National Theatre has made a perfect one. The appointment of Indhu Rubasingham as the seventh artistic director at the theatre Laurence Olivier forged for the nation had been predicted ever since Rufus Norris announced his departure. Indeed, her own leaving announcement from London’s Kiln theatre, where she was artistic director for almost 12 years, was days apart from his in the summer.
There was no other candidate who could come close, in my view. But there was a fear, in the lead up to this happy news, that the NT might bridle against her shoo-in and appoint one of the other contenders, which included, I’m told, some elaborate team and triumvirate applications. I am glad the NT will not be led by committee, nor by a man flanked by diversity add-ons.
This role is not, and should not, be about identity. But Rubasingham will be the first woman in the job, and the first woman of colour, at that. Of course that is significant. She is not the first woman who was qualified for the job, yet here she is, making theatre history with a long overdue gender correction.
Those who dare say she got the job because of her gender need to take a closer look at her accomplishments: after she arrived at the Kiln (then named the Tricycle) in 2012 she came under fire from those who wished the theatre would stay the same, treading water. She tore through that dissent, gave the theatre its new name and brought one critical success after another to its doors – from Florian Zeller’s astounding trilogy (The Father, The Mother and The Son) to Moira Buffini’s Handbagged, Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and, most recently, Ryan Calais Cameron’s remarkable McCarthy-era civil rights story Retrograde. She infused the building with inclusivity on every level, raised its quality of work, and led a £9m refurbishment. We can safely say she turned that theatre around.
She does not need to turn the NT around, nor drag it kicking into the 21st century. Rufus Norris should feel proud of the institution he is leaving behind: more open, more inclusive, simply more inviting than it was a decade ago. It feels like a theatre for the nation, not for one privileged echelon of it alone.
Rubasingham has more than enough experience as an artistic director to do this job. She has directed at the NT before, too, including the highly acclaimed The Father and the Assassin, which came back for a second staging. She is by all accounts well-respected and well-loved. The venue is safe in her hands. But more than that, it is opened up to the prospect of the bold, and the magnificently unexpected – because who wants a merely safe pair of hands? Rubasingham is too talented and experienced to sacrifice quality for any of the risk she takes – and I do hope she takes a few. She knows how to combine brilliant new writing with crowd-pleasers, and how to stage canonical works with verve.
No new director of the NT knows how to do the job until they begin doing it. It is a unique role to be leading a theatre of its size and significance. But Rubasingham put such a clear and dynamic stamp on the Kiln, I expect she will do the same here.
Her official leaving party a few days ago at the Kiln was a testament to her popularity as an artistic director – the downstairs auditorium was filled to capacity and much of the room wiped away tears. In a presentation, the theatre’s team had gathered together adjectives to sum her up: “passionate”, “inspirational” and bearing “inner steel”.
A description that came up time and again was “kind”, an often overlooked quality in our age, so often wrongly considered a solely female trait, and one that can be transformative to the running of an organisation. Here’s to a magnificent new tenure characterised not only by passion and creativity but also an open-armed generosity of spirit.
