Writing about the National Theatre on its 50th anniversary, I said that it was as much a flexible concept as a permanent institution. As it comes up to its 60th this month, that still seems true. The National constantly changes according to the temper of the times and the temperament of its director: you only have to look at the stark differences between the organisation set up by Laurence Olivier at the Old Vic in 1963 and the complex machine run by Rufus Norris on the South Bank in 2023. But with Norris due to step down in the spring of 2025, the big question is what the future holds for the National.
While it is fair to say that each of the National’s six directors has redefined its role, some of their changes are now firmly embedded. There is no going back, for instance, on two of the ideas launched by Nicholas Hytner in his tenure from 2003 to 2015: cheap seats and NT Live. You can still go to the National for £20 (it was £10 when the scheme was first launched) and more people than ever watch NT productions in cinemas or on home screens: recent figures show that a Romeo and Juliet produced during lockdown played in 298 UK cinemas and that 358,587 hours were devoted worldwide to watching shows online using National Theatre at Home in the year April 2021-22.
Norris’s own breakthrough has been in promoting diversity both on stage and in audiences: the adaptation of Andrea Levy’s Small Island, Inua Ellams’s Barber Shop Chronicles and Three Sisters, and the Death of England trilogy from Clint Dyer and Roy Williams have all ensured that the National Theatre no longer feels like an exclusively white enclave.
While Hytner and Norris both made huge advances, there are still big questions facing their successor. What kind of country will they be working in? No one knows but, at the moment, post-Brexit Britain seems more fractured, divided and uncertain than at any time in living memory. The theatre as a whole is also in a state of flux: even though Standing at the Sky’s Edge transferred from Sheffield to the South Bank, the network of permanent regional companies on which the National once relied has all but disappeared.
As the obituaries of Sir Michael Gambon pointed out, he was advised by Olivier in the 1960s to quit the National for a time and hone his craft at Birmingham Rep: a laughably impossible dream today. The combination of Covid, funding cuts (the NT had nearly £1m chopped off its grant for 2023-24) and rising energy prices means the National is under financial pressure. One consequence has been that productions now get straight runs instead of being part of a revolving repertory.
The future of the National depends on any number of factors: the state of the economy, who is in government and who the new director is. I would offer only one recommendation: that, without sacrificing its urgent contemporaneity, the National do more to retrieve plays from the world repertory. In fact, the two things go hand in hand: modern drama is all the stronger if writers are exposed to the disciplines of the classics. I’ve never forgotten that Joan Littlewood’s advice to Shelagh Delaney, after the success of A Taste of Honey, was to go away and read Ibsen, and that Peter Hall applied the textual rigour required of Shakespeare to his initial production of Pinter’s The Homecoming.
I would also argue that the National, given its resources, has a civic duty to revive the drama of the past that, Shakespeare aside, is in danger of being consigned to the dustbin. In fact, there is a strange paradox that in London it is only the smallest theatres that are keeping our dramatic heritage alive. The Orange Tree in Richmond is about to revive Meetings, a 1981 play by the pioneering black playwright Mustapha Matura, and Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer with an all-star cast headed by Greta Scacchi, Tanya Reynolds and Freddie Fox. The Finborough in Earl’s Court has lately given us a fascinating trio of Edwardian rarities and a magnificent Irish play by TC Murray, Birthright. And the Jermyn Street theatre is producing Caryl Churchill’s Owners, which heralded the arrival of a major talent. All these are welcome but I’d like to see the National vigorously re-examining the drama of the past without sacrificing its obligations to the present.
I can see the practical difficulties. Rufus Norris once said to me that, if you want to have a gender-equal repertory, you won’t find much help in a male-dominated past. I was also told by an Oxford academic that it is hard these days to get students to engage with classic texts: they prefer to write about the socioeconomic or historical background than to actually read a play.
For all that, I still feel that there are acres of British and world drama that are being woefully neglected by the big companies, and that whoever takes over the National needs to realise that, despite what we are told in The Go-Between, the past is not a foreign country.
