It ought to be a significant month for Indhu Rubasingham, the new artistic director of the National Theatre. The first two productions of her regime are opening over the coming weeks — a new interpretation of The Bacchae, which she has directed, in the Oliver Theatre, and Operation Mincemeat director Robert Hastie’s apparently irreverent new staging of Hamlet in the Lyttleton — and she knows that the scrutiny of the arts world will be on her, and the NT, as the verdict on her administration comes in. If the first shows are a success (as Nicholas Hytner’s Iraq-themed Henry V was in 2003) then it augurs well for the rest of her tenure. If, however, they flop — as Rufus Norris’s confused revamp of Everyman did in 2015 — then the whispers of “not up to the job” will begin.
No pressure, then. But even as Rubasingham moves into the final stages of rehearsal for The Bacchae, she must feel a sense of irritation (and, quite possibly, jealousy) at the RSC’s announcement of their 2026 season. To be quite frank, it blows everything that the National have promised out of the water. We have Kenneth Branagh returning to Stratford for the first time in three decades, playing Prospero in a Richard Eyre-directed production of The Tempest, and Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard opposite none other than the Oscar-winning American film star Helen Hunt, and we have the increasingly brilliant Mark Gatiss appearing in Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Before this, Adrian Lester is starring in Cyrano de Bergerac, Alfred Enoch in Henry V and, for good measure, there’s a big, family-friendly show, Roald Dahl’s The BFG, this Christmas. And Born With Teeth, the Shakespeare-Marlowe fantasia with Ncuti Gatwa as Kit, took the ballsy step of opening straight into the West End this summer: a daring move at a time we are told that new plays cannot thrive there.
The opportunity to see Kenneth Branagh in Stratford is one that every lover of theatre should jump at
Since Daniel Evans — an acclaimed actor himself — and Tamara Harvey took over the artistic directorship of the RSC in June 2023, the theatre has gone from greatness to greatness. The past year alone has included fine productions of Hamlet, Othello and Titus Andronicus, amongst others, and significant major actors who once tended to avoid heading to Stratford-upon-Avon are being lured back into the theatre through a combination of short runs and irresistible parts. Branagh, for instance, will be playing Prospero while rehearsing for Chekhov, and the two plays will take him from 13 May to 29 August next year, after which time he can return to the lucrative world of playing Euro-villains in blockbusters, if he so wishes. But he is a consummate stage actor and the opportunity to see him in Stratford is one that every serious lover of theatre should jump at.
Where does this leave the National, which has a first season conspicuously devoid of such A-list names (bar Clive Owen, returning in a David Eldridge play)? Certainly, Inter Alia with Rosamund Pike was a decent send-off for the Norris regime, and I am intrigued by both The Bacchae and Hamlet, both of which suggest that Rubasingham wishes to interrogate the canon, rather than simply ignore it altogether. And next year does promise some fascinating shows with big actors, including Paul Mescal in Death of a Salesman and Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. But Branagh hasn’t appeared at the NT since he was in David Mamet’s Edmond in 2003, Lester skipped the Norris era altogether and Gatiss — who won two Oliviers for plays he appeared in at the National — does not appear to have been invited back, either.
Both the RSC and the NT are subsidised theatres, and it is fair to say that there has been a rivalry between the two that only intensified when Peter Hall, regarded as the great lion of Stratford, left the theatre to become the first artistic director of the National. There was a lengthy recent period when neither was producing their greatest work, with the RSC’s Gregory Doran apparently content to stage Shakespeare-by-numbers and Norris actively opposed to traditionalism. However, Evans and Harvey have revitalised Stratfordian theatre over the past few years, to thrilling effect, and the new season’s announcement puts the RSC in pole position in the English-speaking theatre world. How, and whether, Rubasingham and the National can compete remains very much to be seen. If it galvanises her, then theatregoers will be all the richer for the competition.
