For a moment, Indhu Rubasingham stops speaking, catches her breath, blinks back tears. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “I get emotional. But I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for my dad. He would be so blown away that I got this job.”
She pauses again, waving her hand in front of her face to chase away the emotion. The artistic director designate of the National Theatre, the first woman and the first person of color ever to be appointed to the most important position in British theater, is talking about her father, who died 14 years ago.
A.S. Rubasingham was an eye specialist who had moved to the UK from Sri Lanka and who had high hopes that his daughter might follow him into medicine. Born in Sheffield, England, she grew up in the East Midlands town of Mansfield; she was good at science and math, and took all science A levels at Nottingham Girls’ High School, when suddenly theater caught her heart.
“He was worried about me doing a drama degree, but he was really good at listening and was very broad-minded. Compared to other friends, looking back, I realize that I was allowed to be myself. We were always encouraged to have the discussion, though he was very apprehensive about the lack of jobs. I remember once I did a warehouse show, and people were sitting on cushions, and they thought I’d really gone downhill because there weren’t any proper theater seats. But then [the director] Peter Brook came to see it. And so that was OK. That was funny.”
She laughs, warmly and loudly, full of pride and affection. Now 54, and set to become one of the most powerful women in British arts, to say nothing of the global theater scene, programming, fundraising and overseeing hundreds of staff and creatives from the organization’s three-theater brutalist concrete icon on the South Bank of the River Thames, a potentially daunting task lies ahead of her. This is, after all, the theater founded in 1963 with Laurence Olivier as its director. Many of its productions are the stuff of legend. The first starred Peter O’Toole in Hamlet; more recent juggernauts include War Horse and Hadestown, while this spring the Sam Mendes-directed drama The Motive and the Cue, about Richard Burton, John Gielgud, and Elizabeth Taylor, will also transfer to Broadway.
But it is her upbringing alongside her brother, among a loving and extended family of cousins and aunts, in a home that was sociable and full of great food and excellent conversation, that is the key to Rubasingham. “My parents had an arranged marriage, but they were very happy. I think one reason I was so passionate about pursuing the stories I wanted to tell was that I got really fed up with the stereotypes and assumptions. It was just breaking down myths. We were a very tight family. The house was always full of people; the door was always open. It was a loving community.”
It was the community of theater that enticed her when she went on work experience at the Nottingham Playhouse in the mid-1980s, aged 16. “I was backstage with stage management and I absolutely fell in love with it. I loved sweeping the stage! I remember watching people come out of their offices and they all looked very gray. But this world of theater felt very magical and colorful. That was when I thought, Oooh, I need to work out what this is about.”
The same year she saw a touring production of Larry Kramer’s crusading AIDS drama The Normal Heart—and another lightbulb went on. “It was the first contemporary play I had seen,” she says. “It felt so relevant to the time. I didn’t realize theater could be so visceral, political, emotional.”
The twin realizations propelled her to the University of Hull to study drama and then, by slow steps, to her current heights, where, since her hiring was announced almost a year ago, she has been waiting in the wings to take over the National when the current incumbent, Rufus Norris, steps down in 2025. We are talking in the early afternoon in the office that she will soon share with her co-executive director, Kate Varah, a small but comfortable room with a maroon sofa and chair, and a long, narrow, computer-laden desk overlooking the Thames, the trees outside still tinged with green in early autumn. A disco soundtrack from one of the bars on the bustling riverbank below provides a constant soundtrack.
Dressed practically, in blue Toast cottons—shirt, sleeveless sweater, trousers—and brown Birkenstock boots, Rubasingham already looks at home. It helps that she has experience actually running a building. The Kiln Theatre—a much-lauded if comparatively micro-operation in northwest London—might not have the same prominence, but in her more than 11 years in charge she transformed this small but significant theater into a powerhouse of writing and producing, bringing a clever mixture of ground-breaking productions and compelling work to the stage.
Her programming included Florian Zeller’s Family Trilogy (of which The Father went on to be adapted into the Oscar-winning film starring Anthony Hopkins in 2020), Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet, starring Adrian Lester, which transferred to St. Ann’s Warehouse, and Zadie Smith’s riotous Chaucer adaptation The Wife of Willesden, which ended up at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She oversaw a £9 million capital rebuilding program and faced down a long-running controversy when she changed the theater’s name from the Tricycle (the traditions and devotions of London’s theater scene can be a tough needle to shift).
“Starting this job, I’ve not been scared of it,” she says, thoughtfully, of her arrival at the National. “I’ve been overwhelmed, tired, exhausted. But when I started at Kiln, I was petrified—I hadn’t done any of it before and I lived in a perpetual motion of fear and stress. I don’t feel that here. There’s a sense I’ve done the job. Yes, it’s much bigger, but the principles are the same. I’ve got to program shows that sell tickets. I’ve got to have a narrative. And there are just so many good people working here. There’s a lot of support. If there’s something I don’t know about, there are people I can talk to. I’m not finding it out on my own.”
The answer is typical of Rubasingham. The adjectives used to describe her are remarkably consistent. At her Kiln leaving party, her colleagues projected a word cloud: inspirational, brave, fearless, enthusiastic, caring, champion, and kind all appeared in big letters. The word negroni also appeared, albeit in slightly smaller type. There is a sense that many in her industry not only admire her, but love her too.
“She works hard, and she smokes hard, and she is up for a drink afterwards, so she is a girl after my own heart,” Zadie Smith says. She notes that Rubasingham still has the “warmth of a student director… like she’s about to take a group of friends up for their first Edinburgh show. Her energy is like that—unpretentious and up for anything, and full of enthusiasm for the project—but then when you’re in the rehearsal room she’s a completely seasoned and ruthless professional. She transformed The Wife of Willesden from a literary exercise to a living thing. That’s what I value in her: life.”
Actor Clare Perkins starred in that show and notices the same quality. “She works really, really hard, but it’s never a burden for her, it’s always a joy. When I think about Indhu, I think about that smile on her face.”
Yet throughout her career, Rubasingham has always had to battle her own doubts and other people’s preconceptions. At school, she never thought of auditioning for acting roles because she “was the only Asian kid” and was made to feel that parts such as Calamity Jane wouldn’t necessarily be hers. When she went to Hull, she spent her first year being “utterly intimidated.” “Everyone there had done drama A level and National Youth Theatre or wanted to be an actress since the year dot,” she says, looking back. “I felt a complete fraud.”
She didn’t push herself forward, didn’t direct. But in the summer break, “I just gave myself a bit of a talking to. I said, ‘Right, you’re going to direct a play.’” The result—a production of Low Level Panic by Clare McIntyre—won a prize at the National Student Drama Festival, where director Phyllida Lloyd and actor Fiona Shaw were on the judging panel.
Indhu Rubasingham at the Tricycle Theatre, which she later renamed the Kiln, in 1998.
Photo: Getty Images
Even as her 20s progressed, when she won an Arts Council bursary to work as an assistant director at Stratford East, where the radical theater and filmmaker Mike Leigh was in residence, the doubts persisted. “It was an amazing experience, but I remember going in on the first day and everyone was doing huggy huggy, kiss kiss”—she mimes an extravagant greeting—“and I was just like, Oh, this world is mad. It was so overtly theatrical to someone who was new to it.”
This was the point, around 1992, that she met Justine Simons, now London’s deputy mayor for culture and creative industries, who had won a similar traineeship for dance: “We were in shock about it. The scheme was meant to fast-track people who had been in the field for up to 10 years, but both of us had just left college,” Simons remembers, in an email. “For Indhu and me it was a transformative opportunity.”
But that doesn’t mean Rubasingham’s path has been easy. “I do remember being told, with full kindness, that the best way for me to have a career was to start an Asian theater company—and I didn’t want to do that,” she remembers. “It was a different time. [People of color] weren’t in the conversation as we are now. There weren’t people that I could naturally follow. I remember going home to talk to my dad and he’d laugh at me and say, ‘The only thing you can do is to be yourself.’”
It wasn’t just race that proved a barrier. Being a woman also led to resistance. “I remember cutting my hair,” she says. “I had long, curly hair and in my 20s, I decided that if I wanted to be taken seriously as a director, I would have to cut [it], so I had a pixie cut. I remember someone saying: ‘What is it about all you women directors that have short hair?’ What’s lovely to see is that, within 20-odd years, things have changed in terms of female artistic directors. When I started out, assumptions were made, representations or politics were always being put on my shoulders, whether I’d been asked or not. We are equal when everyone is being treated as an individual artist, not as a representative of something.”
Rubasingham’s success as a director on the National’s stages, with shows such as Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherfucker with the Hat (2015) and, most recently, The Father and The Assassin (2022), about the man who shot Gandhi, were part of her calling card for the job, critically acclaimed and—crucially—popular with audiences. This lies at the core of her vision. The specifics of her programming are still strictly under wraps, but she is clear that her aim is “to be as broad and eclectic as possible. That includes the classics, both Shakespeare and modern classics, and musicals, both large and small-scale, in the canon and new.” A dream production? What “gives me goosebumps,” she says, “are big stories I feel haven’t been told before. What are those stories that are going to make everyone—those who have loved the National for decades, as well as people who have never stepped in the building—feel they have a stake or a part in the theater? That’s what I’m really, really interested in.”
She pauses. “I’m feeling so inarticulate,” she says, an unnecessary apology for the words tumbling out. When her appointment was announced, there was a universal sense she was the most obvious choice, but also the right person to take the theater onward in the 21st century. Yet running the National is a job that has taxed her six predecessors—all of them white men, four of them educated at Cambridge. Peter Hall and Richard Eyre both left diaries that recorded suicidal thoughts. Nicholas Hytner enjoyed the task more, but still wrote a narrative of a time pockmarked with disasters and unrelenting pressure alongside the triumphs.
Actor Cate Blanchett knows something of what it is to head a theater: between 2008 and 2013, she co-directed the Sydney Theatre Company with her husband, Andrew Upton. “Indhu’s deep humility is one of her many strengths,” Blanchett emails. “It’s built on the call and response of genuine deep-time creative collaborations. It could be a lonely position—90% of the job is running an enormous organization servicing artists and audiences and advocating for the wider sector. There’s little to no time for one’s own work, but spending time with Inhdu and Kate Varah, who is a laser-sharp dynamo, the room is full of laughter and possibility.”
Her immediate predecessor, Norris, who leaves the building in July next year, has known his successor for more than 20 years, since they were young freelance directors trying to make their way in the profession. He understands more than anyone the ever-increasing challenges facing the theater, the responsibilities of leadership in terms of artistic vision, reach, digital access, and fundraising. “You have got to be available to people and you have to propel your personality to the forefront, really, to engage and listen to people,” he tells me. “Indhu will do that. She is a strong personality, she’s sharp and she’s a really great director. She’s not afraid to be herself and doesn’t pretend to be anyone else.”
Rubasingham echoes this belief in the importance of charting her own course. “If I’m honest, the thing that made me reluctant about applying for this job is that your head is the one that’s going to be over the parapet,” she says with a grin. “But at the moment, I am thinking two things. The first is that I am adamant about enjoying the job. It is a privilege and an honor to be here and to do what we do. I want to keep reminding myself of that. I am also looking at putting things in place to look after myself, so that I can be as fit and healthy as I can.”
In running the building and managing more than 1,000 people, she is confident that she can count on the support of her co-executive director Kate Varah. “My concentration will be on the programming and the artistic side, whereas hers is more on the business side. Between the two of us, we will set the tone and the culture,” Rubasingham says.
Currently, she goes to the theater three to four times a week, trying to watch as much and as broadly as she can. Recent plays that she has loved include the National’s production of Beth Steel’s Till the Stars Come Down, a raucous working-class drama—“I laughed and I cried, and it’s set in Mansfield, where I grew up”—and the rewritten version of Jez Butterworth’s The Hills of California, which she saw on Broadway. “I found it stronger and really beautiful.” She also admired the Alicia Keys musical Hell’s Kitchen. “I’m a big fan of Alicia Keys and the talent on that stage was just beyond anything.”
She has never married and doesn’t have a partner or children. “I made this choice that work was going to be my passion,” she says. “A friend joked, ‘Who’s your partner?’ And it’s theater. When I was leaving Kiln, it was like leaving a relationship.” She laughs again, loud and deep. What little spare time she has is spent with family and close friends or walking on Hampstead Heath, near her home in northwest London’s Kentish Town. She watches cookery shows on YouTube but doesn’t cook much herself. She is also a huge fan of all medical dramas on TV. “I’m obsessed with them. I think I’m secretly a frustrated doctor.”
What is it about theater that has made her dedicate her life to it? “I think it’s the collective, the collaboration, the fact that none of us can do it on our own,” she says. “The synergy of a group of people that creates magic. And I genuinely mean magic. It’s something that is beyond us, that is almost spiritual. That collective live experience where you can’t be texting, you can’t be on your phone. It’s probably one of the only mediums where you can’t be in your own world. You have to share it with a lot of people. It is about society and community and also storytelling.”
One of her earliest decisions was to appoint Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwrights Lynn Nottage and Ayad Akhtar as artistic advisers, part of a group of people she is gathering to supplement her artistic team. She’s worked with both before and describes them as “critical friends.” She is also keen to bring to the National American artists that she has worked with at the Kiln, who include Oscar-nominated actor Colman Domingo and playwright Marcus Gardley. “It’s making sure there’s as many different voices in the room as there can be and that the narrative is told by as many different people as possible,” she says.
That, at root, is her vision for the job she has taken on. “We are living in this time of incredible polarized extremes,” she says. “I think part of the role of the National is to be able to hold those different opinions, even opposing opinions, and ask how do we have a conversation, how do we respect these different voices without canceling or attacking? How do we stop this absolutist black and white?” She pauses, smiles, that Rubasingham warmth emanating from her. If there is anyone, I think, who can find a way to do this, to use theater as a way and place to bring people together, it is her. “Theater sits beautifully in the gray area, in the nuance,” she says. “That’s what I want to celebrate.”
In this story: hair, Tomi Roppongi; make-up, Kirstin Piggott. Set design: Tobias Blackmore
