Natalie Ibu is about to make her National Theatre debut directing a new play about the Brontë sisters, but the Kardashians keep creeping in. “I’m constantly comparing them, because they’re the ultimate disruptors – and they’re also three sisters with a brother that no one really remembers. We may not like what they stand for, but they are successful and exquisite at what they do,” she says.
Ibu is well aware that some will see this as an appalling slight against the 19th-century daughters of a country clergyman, who disrupted the canon by producing some of the most important novels in the English language. She means no disrespect, either to them or to those who know and revere their work, “but the idea that we can’t talk about the Kardashians in the same breath as the Brontës I find deeply offensive,” she says. “Our audiences are cultural consumers who go wherever they find something they like. I want them to be fans of theatre in the way that they’re a fan of Harry Styles.”
It’s Monday morning on the week before rehearsals proper begin, and a day of pre-production consultations lies ahead for Ibu, who strolls in from her Airbnb clutching a takeaway coffee. Underdog: The Other Other Brontë was brought to her attention after it won Sarah Gordon the Nick Darke playwriting award in 2020. And though it was very different to Ibu’s usual work – including a recent hit show for young people, Protest, she thought: “Yes, we have to do this.” It is a co-production with Northern Stage, where Ibu has been artistic director for the last three years.
The underdog is Anne Brontë, who died at just 29 having never quite achieved the success of her two older sisters. The play explores the role that sibling rivalry played in her eclipse, particularly with Charlotte, who altered Emily’s poetry, and is known to have suppressed Anne’s novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for years by vetoing a second print run after the first edition sold out.
In a key scene, Anne berates her sister for gazumping her novel Agnes Grey with Jane Eyre. “Charlotte has this great line, ‘I’m telling you, the novels could not be more different. Mine is strange and gothic and intense. Yours is … realistic.’ She is creating a narrative that excuses what she’s done. But it also makes an important point: that male writers tread over the same ground, with endless stories about kings, and no one questions them. So why can two women not write in the same space?”
It’s a question that resonates strongly for Ibu, who prides herself on being a bit of a disruptor, too. Why, she asks, when 51% of the population are female, “so we’re not a minority, are we still made to feel marginal – that there’s not enough room for us? And I feel the pressure of that across all my identities. It’s intersectional,” she adds. “When you’re also black and queer and working-class it only becomes more heightened – that feeling of not being allowed to be my full self because my value is only from one perspective.”
Ibu, who has just turned 40, went to Northern Stage after six years at the helm of tiata fahodzi, a British-African heritage company specialising in new plays. When she joined, the pandemic was still lingering, so her initial programming was online. Her first live show was Jim Cartwright’s 80s classic Road, relocated from Lancashire to the north-east. “I was partly saying, ‘Your stories are my stories, too,’ and I was proud that 50% of that cast were global majority, because global majority people have been part of the north-east story for decades.” Other successes include Claudia Rankine’s The White Card, about the liberal art world’s blindness to white privilege.
Born and raised in Edinburgh by a mother who was a psychiatric nurse specialising in geriatric care, Ibu had “a very active hobby life, because my mum’s a single parent and I’m an only child. So I think it was part socialisation, and part activities for me to do when my mum was working.” She joined a young writers group at the Traverse theatre, where she saw artistic director Philip Howard in action and, by the age of 17, she had decided that she wanted to be artistic director, too. “There was something about the energy of it and the way that he held the space that made me go, ‘That’s the job I want’ – even though I didn’t really know what it was.”
Her school careers advisor pointed her towards a degree in theatre with arts management, which gave her an all-round grounding but not in the sort of theatre she wanted, as it was focused on performance art. Undeterred, she applied for a positive discrimination grant from the Arts Council and landed a trainee directorship at Nottinghamshire-based New Perspectives just as she was completing her final thesis. She attributes her single-mindedness to her childhood. “As the only black kid in my street, the only black kid in my school, being the only one is not unusual for me. So moving through a world in which we are told there aren’t many of us is not as alienating as it might have been had I grown up in a different place or family.”
Her next ambition, she says, is all about scale. “I want to reach as many people as possible because I believe that theatre changes people and people change the world – and scale enables me to do that,” she says. “Theatre is my activism, so why would I restrict that to 50 people in a studio?”
It’s an ambition that she acknowledges may eventually take her out of theatre altogether. “I’m not saying, ‘Goodbye, I’m off, here’s my resignation via an interview in the Guardian.’ But you know, even when organisations are doing brilliantly, theatre is exclusive. It comes with rules and etiquette and a history of excluding people. It does make me wonder if I should be reaching people in their front rooms, or on their phones. Because no one goes, ‘I’m not wearing the right thing to watch Netflix.’”
This thought brings her back to the challenge of bringing three Victorian sisters back to life for as broad an audience as possible. An Instagram trailer for the show presents a mouthy trio in lippy matching their silky scarlet blouses. Ibu and Gordon “squealed with delight” to see young women tagging their friends with it as a night out not to be missed. People with an established relationship with the Brontës are welcome, she says, but it’s also for the 17-year-old girl who thinks they have nothing to say to her.
“My own relationship with the Brontës began with this play – I’m very honest about that,” she adds. “For so long, I was ashamed of all the things I didn’t know: all the books I hadn’t read and the plays I hadn’t seen. I now think that is my superpower as a leader and an artistic curator. The kind of things that might be perceived as weaknesses are actually an insight: I am your audience.”
Underdog: The Other Other Brontë is at the National Theatre, London, 27 March-25 May, and at Northern Stage, Newcastle, later this year
