Indhu Rubasingham, the new artistic director of the National Theatre — the first woman, and person of colour, ever to hold the post — has announced her debut season, as well as giving a peek behind the (safety) curtain as to what audiences can expect next year, and beyond. As you might expect, it’s a varied and rather giddy witches’ brew that simultaneously nods to the diversity-first approach of the outgoing Rufus Norris regime while hinting at some unexpected and rather welcome classical theatre coming our way before too long.
The National’s artistic directors have traditionally tried to have a first production that will define the theatre in their image for the coming years. Nicholas Hytner (whose all-time-high regime is still fondly talked about by theatre lovers and artistic administrators alike, so thickly packed was it with big hits) started off with Henry V starring Adrian Lester in 2003, which came laden with allusions to the Iraq War; it was an enormous success. Norris’s first production was an all-singing, all-dancing update of the medieval morality play Everyman, adapted by Carol Ann Duffy and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor. It was politely, rather than warmly, received.
Rubasingham’s first show, in the Olivier, will be an edgy version of Euripides’ Bacchae adapted by Nima Taleghani, who is best known for acting in the popular TV show Heartstopper. The publicity blurb declares “This ain’t no classic play, bitches”, and audiences may groan immediately at yet another exercise in would-be edginess. This has, after all, been the year in which Hollywood stars have notably failed to bring ancient Greek drama to the masses, as the Oscar-winners Brie Larson and Rami Malek have flopped in productions of Elektra and Oedipus Rex alike. Yet the casting of the Bacchae, featuring the great classical actor James McArdle and the usually excellent Clare Perkins, is intriguing, and the opportunity for Rubasingham to do something flamboyant and different in the Olivier for her debut is an exciting one. Colour us intrigued, at least.
It’s superb that Rubasingham has seen the value and point of bringing the rep system
And this is a fair description of most of the first season that has been announced. The overall slogan is “The Next Chapter”, and there’s undeniably a switch away from the modernity-at-all-costs ethos of the Norris regime. Perhaps we don’t need yet another production of Hamlet after no fewer than three versions of it from the RSC and another one at the Chichester Festival Theatre, but Robert Hastie, the theatre’s deputy artistic director, is a fascinating figure — it is he who directed the mega-hit comic musical Operation Mincemeat — and Hiran Abeysekera is a bold choice to play the Dane, backed up by an ensemble including the ever-excellent Geoffrey Streatfield and Alistair Petrie. The promotional blurb promises that the show will be “darkly funny”; while it is unlikely that it will equal Rupert Goold’s jaw-dropping, Titanic-themed show from earlier in the year for sheer aplomb, it’s still a welcome return of Shakespeare to the Lyttelton.
There are the usual take it or leave it shows — I won’t be rushing to see Derry Girls’ Nicola Coughlan in The Playboy of the Western World, and another revival of Ballet Shoes smacks of an inability to find anything more interesting to stage — but there are some genuinely exciting new productions coming next year, in particular. I can’t wait to see Lesley Manville and Aidan Turner in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, for instance, and for a fully paid-up Rattigan admirer like myself, a new staging of the rarely seen Man and Boy, starring Ben Daniels, is highly welcome.
They will share space with works that could be fascinating or dismal but deserve the benefit of the doubt. A Rubasingham-directed new adaptation of The Jungle Book has the potential to be a transformative family hit, if it’s done with proper sincerity rather than post-modern colonialism, and the presence of Paul Mescal in Death of a Salesman will presumably bring in the crowds but the casting of Willy Loman should be key to this success or failure. And, pleasingly, Mescal’s also spearheading the return of the rep system, ditched by Norris in 2019 and never resurrected during his tenure post-Covid. This has always been a highlight of the National’s casting, and it’s superb that Rubasingham has seen the value and point of bringing it back.
There is modishness. Stormzy will be involved at some point, and there’s a LGBTQ+ themed musical, in the form of an adaptation of the (excellent) 2014 picture Pride. But generally it’s all a great deal more promising than I had initially feared when I wrote in the magazine’s most recent issue that Rubasingham’s regime would feature “a heavy emphasis on new writing, which she has largely specialised in, with plays by the pale, male and stale confined to the theatre’s library, at best.” Euripides, Shakespeare, Miller, Rattigan, even Synge; there is a welcome return to classicism here, albeit with a decidedly 2025 twist, that makes me feel, for the first time in years, genuinely, albeit cautiously, optimistic about venturing to the South Bank once again.
