‘You become addicted to pressure’: Rufus Norris on success, stress and the National Theatre’s survival
When Rufus Norris was appointed the sixth director of the National Theatre in 2015, he was terrified by the prospect. “Why would I think I could do that?” he says. “I had run a fringe theatre 20 years ago [the Arts Threshold, from 1993 to 1995].” Yet, being terrified was exactly what led him there. “‘Step into your fears’ has been a mantra for my whole career. Go into the thing you’re afraid of because if you’re afraid of it then it means you won’t know what you’re doing – which means you’ll learn more.”
Norris, 59, is sitting in the building that has since become his home, reflecting on his near-decade at the National’s helm. The fear is soon to come full circle; six months from now, he will be back out in the big, bad, scary old world again. Directors have traditionally done two five-year terms – he was not asked to do a third. He is pleased with this outcome because “change is healthy in our industry – it’ll be really good to have a fresh blast come through”. The blast he refers to is Indhu Rubasingham, who floats around outside his office, midway through a year-long handover, and it is clear from the teasing repartee as they pass each other that there is warmth between them.
He might not have had extensive experience in running a building when Norris took over from Nicholas Hytner but he had a wide-ranging, eclectic CV: training as an actor at Rada before directing award-winning shows across the West End and beyond as well as several at the NT, working in opera, directing films that won acclaim in Europe, including at the Cannes film festival.
Known for his lack of grandness, Norris is reluctant to offer up high-minded pronouncements on his departure. “I’m still completely up to my eyes in doing the job and I will be until the day I walk out because that’s the nature of this place,” he says. To that effect, there is next season’s programme, announced on Tuesday, which is his final. While the timing for many of the shows on it has been accidental or serendipitous, what is deliberate is its range. Extending representation both on the stage and off has been a central feature of Norris’s tenure. Many have welcomed the diversity, with greater visibility around race, gender, disability, as well as the nurturing of new writers.
Some, though, have suggested that this is not what a national theatre is for. What would he say to them? “We’ve got Coriolanus on tonight. Would you like to come to see it?” he volleys back. His changes should not be mistaken for political acts, nor part of a culture war, he says. “We’re called a national theatre, which means we have to be nationwide and that we have to represent the nation. It’s very easy to look at the demography of the UK, those figures are available to everyone. Half the people in this country are women [for example], so let’s get to a place where that is the representation we are seeing on our stage in terms of actors but also writers and directors.”
While this statistical representation is important, what is key is that it actually makes the work better. “If you look at art across the board, the world over, bringing different voices in – different lived experience and truths – increases the quality of it.”
The same applies to heritage, he says. Norris grew up in Africa and Malaysia, while the current deputy artistic director, Clint Dyer, is Black British, born and bred in London. “Who’s British, me or Clint? I would say he’s more British than I am. Some people would disagree with that. I don’t agree with them.”
With these guiding principles in mind, how does he reflect back on the criticism he received for a mid-season announcement featuring no female writers in spring 2019? “The way we’d been thinking about it is that we need to get the representation across the year, and what that taught us was that we were going to be judged on every specific announcement, so you then bear that in mind.”
A high point for Norris has undoubtedly been in the New Work Department he set up. “The first thing we did was move the literary department from this [main] building up to the studio and encourage much more engagement with the projects coming through it.” Last year, the NT’s new plays [from Beth Steel’s Till the Stars Come Down to Gillian Slovo’s Grenfell, Jack Thorne’s The Motive and the Cue and James Graham’s hugely popular Dear England] came out of long years of process, all of them “slow-cooked” in this department. “Seeing them come to fruition in the same year was proof of the pudding in terms of that decision to strengthen our commitment to having the writer in the room, which has been a key priority for me.”
Does he acknowledge the historical bias that keeps some excluded from this developmental process, to which many writers of colour have attested? “I think one of the unavoidable truths about theatre culture is that historically the opportunities have not been broad enough. That’s something that a lot of people have been working hard to redress, including this place.”
Other “wins”, as he sees it, involve the theatre’s engagement with the nation, especially in collaborative regional projects such as We’re Here Because We’re Here, which he did with the artist Jeremy Deller in 2016, involving community members across the country marking the 100th anniversary of the first battle of the Somme. “It really broke out of what a National Theatre had done before and people’s expectations of what theatre could be.” There was the staging of Pericles by a company of all ages from across London, too, in 2018, the first project under the Public Acts initiative. He has also worked hard around sustainability and the environment within theatre and it is an area in which he would like to remain involved.
In terms of legacy, he does not think it his job to decide where the volume might be turned up or down after he leaves but he hopes the practice of having the writer in the room continues. This refers not only to new plays but revivals, adaptations and musicals so they feel fresh and evolved. For example, when Jamie Lloyd recently revived The Effect, its writer, Lucy Prebble, was there.
The theatre’s digital work has been immense in the past decade, he feels. “NT Live was created in Nick Hytner’s time – we just ran with that brilliant idea. And then out of Covid, NT at Home was formed and is now watched across 184 countries by people “who will never have the chance to come here”. There is the NT Collection, too, which is in 89% of state secondary schools, free of charge. “That reach is really profound.”
That’s not to say the Covid pandemic, when theatres turned dark across the land, was not a devastating time. In fact, it was the biggest crisis point of Norris’s tenure and he speaks of “before Covid” and “after Covid” in relation to the earthquake it brought for the industry.
He lobbied hard for government support and feels that Boris Johnson’s cabinet listened; the culture recovery fund helped to avert “the absolute worst”, he says, and he is thankful for it. Was there a moment when he thought the NT could sink? “I think it would be a very foolhardy government that allowed their national theatre to disappear, particularly when theatre is historically such an important part of this country’s culture. I didn’t think that, in the long-term, there wouldn’t be a national theatre, but I thought that in the short- to medium-term it could be changed beyond recognition. And I feared if there wasn’t quick action we would lose a huge proportion of a workforce that is highly skilled and has taken generations to build up. I also felt that the effect it would have on our freelance community would be devastating and in some ways it was.”
If there was any kind of silver lining to that time, it was in the way the industry banded together. “It decimated audiences around the country, which have not fully recovered. But the crisis demanded that our relationship with each other across the sector, and from there our relationship with government, became more coherent … I think some of what we learned about how to talk to government has remained.”
David Hare recently criticised the NT for not putting on enough plays and spoke of his desire to see the resurrection of the repertory system on which the theatre was founded. Does Norris think this is a thing of the past now? “No, I think it’s great for audiences and there are lots of positives about it but also great challenges. With all due respect to David, he doesn’t have to deal with the pragmatics. I think it’s likely at some stage that the National will at least in part return to that. It just hasn’t been right for this time. When you’re talking about your survival, you make some big decisions and that was one of them.”
During Norris’s tenure, there have been six prime ministers and a revolving door of 11 culture ministers, some taking theatre more seriously than others. He has not met the current incumbent, Lisa Nandy, but “I like what I read about her, she seems very smart … I look forward to developing a relationship with her in the time we’ve got left”.
Post Covid challenges remain, especially in encouraging audiences back, but Norris does not worry about the future of theatre in the long-term. “It doesn’t matter how good television and film get, or how good your phone is. People still want to be together, and they want to be told stories.”
He would not presume to offer any advice on how to do the job to Rubasingham and Kate Varah, executive director and joint chief executive. “I would, to a degree, be teaching my grandmother to suck eggs. But I would advise her [Rubasingham] to keep healthy. The job is very demanding. It’s very easy to get dragged into 90 or 100-hour weeks. That needs a counterbalance.”
I wonder what his next move may be, six months from now. Will he direct, return to film, maybe even retire? Absolutely not to the latter, but at the moment he is deliberately trying to keep it completely open. “I’m going to have a year away from London. I want to switch off, be in nature. I want to try and recalibrate, get my creative energy back.”
He also wants to wean himself off what he thinks of as a dependency on the job “because you do become addicted to work and pressure and you know, ‘The world needs me so I must get out of bed really early or never go to bed at night.’ Of course the world doesn’t and that’s a recipe for disaster.”
Norris trained as a painter and decorator, working in the building trade for a few years before going to Rada. Might we see him coming back as a builder or a carpenter? “Funnily enough, I’m going to spend a week in the carpentry workshop [at the NT] as a mini apprentice. It’s on my bucket list and one of the things I’m going to do before I go.” There is also his love of wild swimming and kayaking. He opens up his notebook to reveal two beautifully pencil-sketched kayaks along the margins. “This is a doodle I did the other day. I’m designing the kayak that I want to have when I go away, to work out the best shape for it.”
His wife, Tanya Ronder, a writer with whom he has collaborated, most recently on the NT’s Christmas show, Hex, left the industry to retrain in 2019 (he does not want to say any more) and her move has inspired him to possibly do the same. “I’ve never been to university. Would that be a thing to do at some stage? I’m very keen to learn new things.”
Whatever he decides, it will be guided by his mantra: run towards the things that scare you. “The important thing is to not grasp at any kind of security,” he says. “Step into the fear.”
Spring season at the National
Suzie Miller’s new play, Inter Alia, following the success of her last, Prima Facie, will star Rosamund Pike
Shaan Sahota’s first play, The Estate, a family drama-cum-political satire, featuring Adeel Akhtar
David Lan’s The Land of the Living, about the displaced children of the second world war, directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Juliet Stevenson
The final instalment of David Eldridge’s trilogy, End, directed by Rachel O’Riordan
A staging of Michael Abbensetts’ Alternations, a seminal work about the Guyanese experience of 1970s London and the Windrush generation, from the Black Plays Archive based at the NT, starring Arinzé Kene and Cherrelle Skeete.
Stephen Sondheim’s final musical, Here We Are, which premiered off-Broadway in 2023, starring Rory Kinnear and Tracie Bennett
A return of two recent NT shows: James Graham’s football drama about Gareth Southgate’s team, Dear England, now with an updated ending, and the Aneurin Bevan play, Nye, starring Michael Sheen
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