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The role of England manager has been called “the impossible job”. There’s the weight of expectation, of leading a nation’s hopes. Get one big decision wrong, or luck goes against you, and the newspapers, the fans, the public turn on you.
I’m put in mind of this for two reasons this week – one, that I saw for the second time James Graham’s fantastic play Dear England, about the current England football manager Gareth Southgate and how he stamped his mark on the job, changing the culture of the England team from within, bringing first the players with him and then the whole nation.
It has transferred from the National Theatre to the West End and, my God, it’s good. So fun, so clever, so joyful, quite instructive if you don’t know anything about football, and the audience is full of lads, which means NO QUEUE for the ladies at half time.
And two, that – hurray – Indhu Rubasingham, director of the Kiln Theatre in Kilburn, has been named as successor to Rufus Norris as boss of the National Theatre. Which, as my Standard Theatre Podcast co-host Nick Clark pointed out, is basically theatre’s equivalent of the impossible job – it’s the pinnacle, setting the agenda for the nation, all eyes are on you, every decision picked over and questioned. Get it wrong and the knives are out.
But Rubasingham has the quality to stamp her own mark on this most difficult of tasks and her appointment was received with universal delight, industry-wide. “Sometimes, good things really do happen and the job goes to absolutely the right person,” said commentator David Benedict. “While the rest of the world seems to be making all the wrong decisions, the National Theatre has made a perfect one,” said critic Arifa Akbar.
Tributes poured in from across the board, praising Rubasingham’s mentorship, her collaborative approach, her nurturing of creativity and championing of new writing. She carries with her a bunch of firsts – as only the seventh Artistic Director to be appointed since the theatre was founded by Sir Laurence Olivier in 1962, she’s the first woman in the job, and the first person of colour; she’s also one of very few not to be educated at Cambridge (Olivier and Norris both went to drama school), having graduated from Hull.
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She’s also got a fair few controversies under her belt, which will help with the brickbats when they inevitably arrive. There was a lot of slightly weird fuss about changing her theatre’s name from the Tricycle (which sounds like a children's theatre) to the Kiln. She rode it out, oversaw a stunning capital project, improving pretty much everything about the building, and it was hailed a huge success.
Then there was the episode in 2014 when Rubasingham announced that she and the board had taken the decision not to host the Jewish Film Festival while it received funding from the Israeli Embassy, due to the conflict in Gaza (the theatre offered alternative funding, but the festival declined to sever the relationship). It prompted a huge backlash; again, she rode it out, and emerged unscathed.
She will enter the brutalist building on the South Bank in 2025 (after about a year of skulking about on the sidelines as Norris heads into his final run), with the roar of the hopeful crowd in her ears.
But man, it’ll be tough. Remember what it was like for Norris, for the first few – actually quite a few – years? A massive number, in reality, of brilliant shows (Everyman with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Angels in America with Andrew Garfield, Small Island, The Lehman Trilogy, Network, Amadeus, The Deep Blue Sea with the peerless Helen McCrory, Natasha Gordon’s Nine Night, Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs) was eclipsed for commentators by a patchy rash of duds that stood out like a sore thumb.
Saint George and the Dragon was one of the worst plays I’ve ever seen (my mother flatly refused to go back in after the interval); there was that awful Macbeth with Anne-Marie Duff and Rory Kinnear, two excellent actors lost in a production that raised the question of why two Scottish aristocrats were living in a cab office; A Light Shining in Buckinghamshire was interminable; Hex was awful and we will draw a veil over wonder.land and never speak of it again. It made people question loudly why he’d been given the job.
Then there was Covid so, you know. But The Stage Awards have just named the National as one of their Theatre of the Year nominees, after a cracking 12 months that have featured The Motive and the Cue, Dear England, the completion of Roy Williams and Clint Dyer’s Death of England Trilogy and a stonking adaptation of The Witches that I reckon could do a Matilda. It goes to show, people need to settle in, and, possibly, get over themselves. And the rest of us need to get over ourselves too.
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And it means this is a hugely exciting time for Rubasingham to be taking over. Unlike Southgate, she doesn’t need to bring about cultural change from scratch. Norris has started that work for her – not always consistently, such as when he screwed up a 2019 programme announcement by not having any women ready to put in it – but he has worked tirelessly to improve the diversity in the building, setting targets right from the start of his reign, which included bringing in Clint Dyer as deputy artistic director, the first black British artist to have written, directed and acted at the National Theatre and (shockingly) its first black director of Othello (another fantastic production).
And he has made moves to make the National more, well, national, nurturing co-producing relationships with regional theatres, so that its work is more widely seen, and helping to put London’s weight behind struggling organisations across the UK.
But the National is also struggling. Income rose by 40 per cent last year, but it’s still not where it was pre-pandemic. The £19.7 million loan that the theatre took out from the Culture Recovery Fund in 2020 will come due for repayment in 2025, just as Rubasingham takes up post.
She’ll be expected to come up with a killer first season, to cherish the nation’s literary tradition (as she did with her Kiln commission of Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden, a reworking of Chaucer's The Wife of Bath), to embrace new work (again, very much in her wheelhouse), embrace the regions, embrace diversity, all on bugger-all cash.
It’s one hell of a job. But an impossible one? If anyone, Rubasingham has what it takes.
What the Culture Editor did this week
Rubens and Women, Dulwich Picture Gallery
Even if you think you don’t really like Rubens, this gorgeous exhibition is a bit of a revelation. It paints a picture of a man who, rather than just fetishising them (as his great big paintings stuffed with luscious nudes can suggest), revered and respected women, from his mother to his powerful female patrons and his two intelligent wives, and was a whizz at capturing their complex personalities. Well worth a visit.
Infinite Life, National Theatre
If you want high stakes and fast paced action, this is not the show for you. But Annie Baker’s funny, understated new play, about a group of women (and one bloke) visiting a crank clinic for chronic pain, is a richly layered portrait of the dynamics between women, and what it is to live with a condition that simply cannot be fully understood by your loved ones. The performances are great, and it doesn’t outstay its welcome.