Rubasingham, Indhu

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    National Theater, Source of Broadway Hits, Gets Its First Female Leader

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    Indhu Rubasingham will lead the venerable London institution where plays including “War Horse” and “The Lehman Trilogy” originated.Since the National Theater opened in London in 1963, its artistic directors have been among the greats of British theater: Laurence Olivier, Peter Hall, Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn, Nicholas Hytner and Rufus Norris. They also had two other things in common. All six are white men.On Wednesday, the theater brought that era to an end when it announced the appointment of Indhu Rubasingham to the top position. She will be the first woman and person of color to lead the National Theater.Rubasingham, 53, will join next spring, the theater said in a news release. She will work for a year alongside Norris, who is departing, before taking sole charge in spring 2025, when she will also share the role of chief executive with Kate Varah, the theater’s current executive director. That sharing of responsibilities is a change for the theater, where Norris currently holds both roles.With three theaters in its building alongside the River Thames, the National, as it is known, stages around 20 plays and musicals each year, and has almost 900 full-time employees. Critics and theatergoers expect it to produce the best new shows and revivals in London, while also staging work that comments on the state of the nation. On top of that, it is tasked with incubating new talent, mounting touring productions across Britain and running an extensive education program.Rubasingham will have to do all of that in the face of a shrinking budget and soaring inflation. Many theaters in Britain, including the National, receive annual government grants meant to cover about a fifth of their operating costs, but the amount of those subsidies is declining. Last year, Arts Council England, the funding body, slashed the National’s subsidy by 5 percent, to 16.1 million pounds (about $20 million), as part of a drive to reallocate grants to institutions outside London.Beginning in fall 2024, the National will face further budgetary pressure when it has to start repaying a loan worth about $25 million. Britain’s government lent the theater the money during the coronavirus pandemic to help the shuttered institution shore up its finances.Rubasingham will be expected to produce money-spinning transfers to both the West End and Broadway. Over the past decade or so, the National’s transfers to New York have included “War Horse,” “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” and “The Lehman Trilogy.” Next year, it is sending “The Effect,” a recent hit, to The Shed.The National, as it is often known, stages around 20 plays and musicals each year.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesAt the much smaller London playhouse that she currently leads, the Kiln, Rubasingham has directed several hits that have found their way to New York, including “Red Velvet,” about the experiences of an African American actor in 19th-century London, which played at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2014, and Zadie Smith’s “The Wife of Willesden,” which recently played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Her programming at the theater, which changed its name from the Tricycle to the Kiln under her leadership, included acclaimed shows like “The Father,” “The Mother” and “The Son” from Florian Zeller’s trilogy, and works by emerging playwrights.Her time at that theater has not been without controversy.When Israel invaded Gaza in 2014, Rubasingham announced that the theater would no longer host some screenings for the U.K. Jewish Film Festival if it continued to accept funding from the Israeli government. The ultimatum caused a minor furor, and the editor of The Jewish Chronicle called the Tricycle “officially antisemitic” on social media. (The screenings went ahead at other venues.)A spokeswoman for the National Theater said that Rubasingham was unavailable for an interview, and the theater had no comment about the incident.The rebranding of the Tricycle in 2018, so that it became the Kiln, also caused a fuss, and many critics were mystified by the name change.Born in the northern English city of Sheffield to Sri Lankan Tamil parents, Rubasingham has said in interviews that as a teenager she expected to become a doctor until she accepted a work experience placement at the Nottingham Playhouse, a regional theater. She studied drama at Hull University and then worked as a trainee director at the Theater Royal Stratford East in London, where she worked with Mike Leigh, the movie director.Even with a lengthy track record at the Kiln, the National appointment is a huge step up. Clint Dyer, the National Theater’s deputy artistic director, outlined the challenges of running the organization in a recent interview with the Times of London. Whoever got the top job, he said, needed to have the “experience, understanding, empathy, desire” and “forward thinking” required to run any major arts institution, but also “the knowledge of the canon, of new playwriting and the ability to speak to donors, to government, to people like me.”“It’s a herculean task,” Dyer said. More

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      Review: In ‘The Wife of Willesden,’ a Literary Marriage Falters

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      Zadie Smith brings her first play, an adaptation of Chaucer’s the Wife of Bath tale, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.This April, in New York, when the rains have come and the winds have calmed and the cherry trees and hyacinths have hustled into bloom, theatergoers might find themselves making a pilgrimage to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, for the New York premiere of “The Wife of Willesden,” the novelist Zadie Smith’s adaptation of a lusty wedge of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales.” And despite the punch and panache of the play’s language, they might find themselves going nowhere.As literary marriages go, one between Smith (“White Teeth,” “On Beauty,” “Swing Time”) and Chaucer, is in theory, of true minds. Though separated by some 600 years, both are keen stylists, eager comedians and dyed-in-the-worsted-wool humanists with a consuming interest in the varieties of emotion and experience. But marriage is hard and somehow Smith’s rendering — presented by BAM in association with A.R.T. — never quickens into life. “The Wife of Willesden,” Smith’s first play, is bookish bed death.Smith, aided by the director Indhu Rubasingham, has updated the action to the present and the setting a few miles north, from a South London tavern to a pub on the Kilburn High Road. (Rubasingham is the artistic director of Kilburn’s Kiln Theater, where the play debuted in 2021.) In Robert Jones’s design, the pub expands across the whole stage floor with lamps and lanterns flickering high above. Chaucer’s text, even unfinished, extends to 29 pilgrims and a host. Here the cast runs to just 10, though audience members seated onstage at wooden tables, swell those numbers.A prologue delivered by a character identified as Author (Jessica Murrain, charming in Smith drag), explains the circumstances. These pilgrims aren’t religious. (Unless drinking is your religion?) Instead, they are locals, out for a beer and a laugh and committed to a “lock-in,” a way to keep the party going long after closing time.In Smith’s rendering, Chaucer’s tapestry has shrunk to just one thread, though arguably its most vivid. If you have read “The Canterbury Tales,” from the cheerful bawdry of the Miller’s tale to the formalities of the Knight’s tale, the Wife of Bath will have leaped off the page in her scarlet stockings. Earthy, contradictory, impulsive and self-aware, she seems effortlessly and shockingly modern.The Wife, or Alison as Chaucer calls her, advocates for female pleasure and female autonomy and has some tart words regarding the prowess of her elderly husbands. What does it mean to offer her a modern vernacular and wardrobe? Extrapolating from “The Wife of Willesden,” not that much.Alison has been renamed Alvita. She is played with archness and authority and hip-swinging sass, shot through with vulnerability, by Clare Perkins, who has traded in those red stockings for a cold-shoulder dress and some very high heels. In Chaucer she is introduced as, “a worthy woman all her life.” Here: “She’s been that bitch since 1983.”Story within the story: Troy Glasgow and Ellen Thomas in the tale Alvita tells about a soldier who rapes a young woman and is forced to learn what women really want.Stephanie BergerAs in Chaucer’s poem, she prefaces her tale with what is essentially her life story, enlisting the pub’s patrons as her many husbands and various friends and acquaintances. (The ensemble is nimble throughout.) Smith’s language is jewel-bright, particular and lively, and Perkins’s performance is brassy and expressive. But every time the Wife addressed the Brooklyn audience — sometimes rhetorically, sometimes seeking an actual reply — there was no response to her call.How to explain these connectivity issues? Smith’s vocabulary, which mixes North London vernacular and Jamaican patois, may be one problem. And the accents, however mild, might rattle unfamiliar ears. Then there’s the form, which attempts to expand the monologue into something more communal and multivocal. Rubasingham’s direction is busy. Maybe it’s too busy (there are disco songs and a haloed Black Jesus). And yet these efforts fail to lift this literary exercise to drama.But the principal problem is the way that Smith has collapsed the now and the then. In the general prologue, the Author warns that audience members might feel surprise or offense at Alvita’s thirsty frankness:“It’s worth remembering — though I’m sure you know —When wives spoke thus six hundred years agoYou were all shocked then. The shock never endsWhen women say things usually said by men”Yet there’s no shock here. Alvita has been married more than most, sure, but her advocacy for equality, for freedom, for great sex is hardly radical now. Maybe it wasn’t even so extreme back then; the Wife became a favorite of balladeers. Her speech still has moments of ambivalence, as when she says that she found great happiness with a man who abused her. (Yes, he repented, but still.) And in the tale Alvita tells, about a soldier who rapes a young woman and is forced to learn what women really want, there remains no genuine justice for the victim. But Smith leaves this tension mostly unexplored and unresolved.The play ends with Alvita and her husbands singing along to Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman,” which is both apposite and wrong. The Wife of Bath is an everywoman, but she’s also a singular literary creation, a character who transcends her moment. She doesn’t really need the updates — or the knockoff Jimmy Choos — to speak to ours.The Wife of WillesdenThrough April 16 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More