For seven years, Rufus Norris has led the National Theatre on London’s Southbank, a Brutalist bat cave that engulfs three main stages, nine bars and restaurants plus rehearsal studios and education spaces—but with precious little light. When he calls me by Zoom, Norris has positioned himself next to one of the National’s few terrace windows, wide blue skies behind him. He gives off a humility bordering on shyness, as if still unconvinced he’s in command. Norris’s second five-year contract as artistic director is up in three years. What happens next?
The role of the National Theatre, as Norris’s new deputy Clint Dyer puts it to me, is to be “embroiled in what the nation is thinking and feeling.” Dyer, a leading black British theatre-maker, shares both Norris’s background as an actor and his interest in state-of-the-nation plays. But rarely in the National’s history has the nation been so angry and divided. Discontinuity characterises the Norris era. He arrived in 2015, having built a reputation with gritty musicals—notably London Road, about the Ipswich Ripper case. He had clear goals: a commitment to diversity; bolder political engagement; and a renewal of digital outreach. Fifteen months later, Brexit demanded a cultural response. Then, in early 2020, a new virus arrived that posed the greatest financial challenge faced by the NT since its foundation in 1963. Can Norris, Dyer and their team respond artistically to the nation’s trauma, when they are still reeling from having to make 400 staff redundant?
Two months before the pandemic hit, US magazine the Atlantic described Norris as “the closest thing British theatre has to a prime minister.” That is a common misconception. Norris is appointed by the theatre’s board, not elected by anyone in the wider theatre community. His first Covid-related task was to oversee the postponement or cancellation of 120,000 tickets—“if you think about communicating with 120,000 people, that’s eye-watering, just the IT systems”—and to ensure the National could be kept securely closed down. Nonetheless, Norris and his chief executive Lisa Burger did end up spending about 50 per cent of their time in 2020 on advocacy for a crisis-hit arts sector.
Norris expresses dismay at the vacuum of formal theatre leadership: stronger arts industry associations, he says, might have co-ordinated a better response. The theatre world “is very, very interdependent, but it’s very disparate in lots of ways,” he tells me. This was an issue when lobbying for a financial rescue package. The Department of Culture “were very clear about the fact that they needed the industry to speak in one voice… and not just for theatre: music, dance, you know, all of the performing arts.” Still, the National was in a privileged position. Its chair, Damon Buffini, became chair of the Culture Recovery Fund (CRF), which ended up lending £19.7m to the National. Another board member, Louise Charlton, is a vice chair of the PR and lobbying megafirm Brunswick, which I learn has provided pro-bono advice to the National on how to advocate in Whitehall.
For Norris, the loan was an ironic coda to a piece he wrote for the Stage in January 2020, which saw him lambasted by leftist theatremakers for acknowledging that his job involved speaking constructively to the Conservative government about funding. He is himself a man of the left: “I used to go to Labour ward meetings in my twenties… then I just got really busy.” But when we speak about politics, he returns to the human stories behind the headlines. We spoke just a few days after Boris Johnson’s long-time cultural adviser Munira Mirza had angrily resigned from Downing Street. Rather than the policy implications, though, Norris is more interested in this as a story of “divorce… whatever you think of him or her that is obviously a very, very deep rooted friendship… a very human thing that is playing out there.” Dyer speaks similarly about the need to root political theatremaking in human experiences. How should the National engage with politics? “By putting on good work. The work speaks for itself.”
The problem has been that, for long stretches of Norris’s tenure, the work simply hasn’t been that good. The National’s frantic attempts to prove it understood Leave voters resulted in the verbatim piece, My Country, in which coarse personifications of the UK’s regions strutted around the Dorfman stage like a set of pageant stereotypes. Further failed Brexit plays, Common and St George, followed. It didn’t help Norris that Nick Hytner, his predecessor, launched a nearby theatre, The Bridge, which has lured away long-time National associates like Alan Bennett and Philip Pullman.
Attempts at feminism have been hit and miss. One of Norris’s first productions, a revival of Harley Granville-Barker’s play Waste, sympathetically explored the life of an Edwardian liberal politician, played by the luminous Charles Edwards. But his mistress, dying of a botched abortion, is merely a convenient learning experience. It was a harbinger of gender traps to come. In 2019, hundreds of writers signed an open letter condemning a schedule featuring plays written only by men; Sandi Toksvig suggested the theatre had lost the right to the word “national.” In response, last year Norris fulfilled a landmark pledge to ensure that 50 per cent of living writers, 50 per cent of directors, and 50 per cent of performers were female—he has extended the target for another year. Meanwhile, even curmudgeonly critics admit that the National’s output has flourished since the Brexit wobble.
Much of this improvement stems from the theatre’s determination to respond intelligently to racial issues. Dyer’s appointment as deputy artistic director in 2021 came as cultural institutions across the country raced to hire ethnic minority creatives although, as Dyer points out, both his own “ascent” at the National and Norris’s commitment to racial diversity predate Black Lives Matter. Death of England, an extraordinary one-man show about a white working-class man struggling to resist the lure of the far right, created by Dyer and Roy Williams for Rafe Spall, opened before George Floyd’s death. Its sequel, Death of England: Delroy, marked the National’s first pandemic re-opening in October 2020. Dyer is sharp on the importance of storytelling when building a shared history. “People marched to be called black, and now we’re not going to use that word anymore?” he asks, of successive generations’ attempts to redefine the terminology of race.
The National’s work on race continues to be both critically and commercially successful. In late March, it will revive Norris’s acclaimed, sell-out production of Small Island, a story of Windrush-era Jamaican immigrants based on Andrea Levy’s novel. Emma Rice’s energetic adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which opened in February, is an apt companion piece. On the Lyttelton stage, Ash Hunter’s Jamaican-accented performance of Heathcliff is a model of how to build multiracial histories rooted in the English landscape. Despite the misstep of social comedy Manor (zero stars in the Times, one in the Guardian), both shows follow a run of other artistic successes, including, in 2021, Alice Childress’s 1955 play Trouble in Mind, starring the brilliant Tanya Moodie as an African-American actress frustrated with Broadway.
Norris is not going anywhere soon. His first goal is to stabilise the finances after Covid; long term, the theatre needs to fundraise privately to repay its CRF loan. Fortunately, his ambition to build digital outreach has paid off—even before the pandemic, NT Live cinema screenings were providing 10 per cent of the theatre’s income, and that looks set to rise with the launch of NT at Home, its on-demand platform. Toby Coffey, head of digital development, enthuses to me about a new “Immersive Storytelling Studio,” which is integrating virtual reality headsets into performance. It sits in “New Work,” once the “Literary Department.” To traditionalists, the name change indicates Norris’s dereliction of the canon.
Norris is looking forward to stepping back from crisis micro-management. “You know, being in every meeting, getting involved in everything all the time—that’s not sustainable, and it’s actually not a very good model of management.” Chief executive Burger is departing after 20 years—“there’s a lot of burnout,” says Norris, pointing also to the resignation of Tom Morris from the Bristol Old Vic.
Burger will be replaced by Kate Varah, who is currently executive director of the London Old Vic. Varah has worked in senior roles at the Old Vic since 2009 and for six years overlapped with Kevin Spacey’s time as artistic director, a time which has, since his departure in 2015, been marked by allegations of sexual harassment against Spacey. Norris is indignant about criticisms of Varah’s appointment and assures me that they have discussed the lessons of the Spacey era in depth. (Dyer goes further, describing Varah as a “victim of Spacey.”) High-profile jobs are hard, says Norris. “I don’t think anybody emerges out of periods of scrutiny like the ones that we’ve been through without being attached to controversy.” Norris’s years at the National have been a long learning period. But maybe, in his final few, his own tough lessons will bear rich fruit.
Correction: An earlier version of this article wrongly stated that Kate Varah “co-led the Old Vic during Kevin Spacey’s time as artistic director.” The article has now been corrected. Kate Varah was business director, and latterly COO, between 2009 and 2015, and was not involved in the artistic running of the organisation. When Matthew Warchus was appointed as artistic director in 2015, Kate Varah was then appointed as executive director to co-lead the organisation with him.
