As Rufus Norris prepares to leave the London playhouse he has led since 2015, he reflects on his quest to make the theater represent the audience it serves.
When Rufus Norris became the director of the National Theater in 2015, he said he had one main aim: to make the playhouse representative of Britain.
Almost a decade later and as Norris prepares to leave the role, he said he had made progress toward that goal, especially by prioritizing new works. Many of the theater’s most acclaimed recent productions have centered people of color, including an adaptation of Andrea Levy’s “Small Island,” directed by Norris, about Caribbean immigrants to Britain.
On Tuesday, Norris, 59, unveiled a typically diverse final season, including “Inter Alia,” Suzie Miller’s follow-up to her hit legal play “Prima Facie”; Shaan Sahota’s “The Estate,” about a British Asian politician’s downfall; and a revival of Michael Abbensetts’s “Alterations,” about immigrants struggling to establish a tailoring business in 1970s London.
Norris will be hoping some of those shows transfer to Broadway, following National Theater hits like “The Lehman Trilogy” and “War Horse.”
In a recent interview, Norris said the demands of the job had meant he hadn’t found time to reflect on his leadership. But an hourlong exchange gave Norris the opportunity to discuss his work at the National, the playhouse’s changing relationship with New York and his plans to step away from the theater world — at least for a while. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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