The new artistic director of the National Theatre is Indhu Rubasingham, who this weekend told the Sunday Times what to expect from her tenure. Now hang on to your hats, because it’s bold, exciting and unexpected stuff.
No, don’t be silly, of course it isn’t. It’s utterly ordinary, bog-standard, progressive-establishment rubbish. But you will, I’m afraid, need to hang on to your breakfast when I reveal the exciting programme Rubasingham has lined up for the nation. I hereby state that I will not be legally liable for any crinjuries (injuries resulting from cringe) which are sustained by readers who go further than this point. You have been warned.
There is to be a ‘staging of Euripides great tragedy The Bacchae. It launches her reign at the National with what she promises to be “wild anarchic energy” in a new rap version by the actor Nima Taleghani. Who, incidentally, has never written a play before.’
There’s more. We hear that a trailer for Hamlet ‘shows the Sri Lankan actor Hiran Abeysekera, dressed in Jacobean ruff and declaiming “To be or not to be,” before adding a sardonic “innit”, winking at the camera, patting a skull and putting on a pair of hipsterish shades.’
The Sunday Times also tells us that Rubasingham’s ‘mandate is surely to inject energy, electricity and eclecticism, to put a new twist on the classics, to showcase writers, directors and actors who have been kicking up a storm elsewhere and should be given the chance to strut their stuff on the National’s three stages, and to bring in new, younger audiences. That she is planning a collaboration with Stormzy is another statement of intent’. A collaboration with Stormzy? That puts Rubasingham on the same level as McDonalds, and indeed the NT’s offering has the same energy, electricity and eclecticism as a chicken nugget.
These previews seem to genuinely excite Richard Morrison, chief culture writer of the Sunday Times, who provides Rubasingham with a write-up so prostrated, so puffing and fluffing, that it equals the programme of coming attractions as a magnificent exercise in pure nausea. Read the whole thing, if you dare. I do feel sorry for the culture staff on these papers; they have to play nicely with the publicity machines of our moribund institutions. But what a toll it must take on the individual, to pretend to himself that this is anything but a torrent of trash and a cascade of cliché.
Rubasingham’s path to the top – she is ‘the first woman and the first person of colour to run the powerhouse’ the Times informs us – is very much what you’d expect. Her ‘mission’ in her previous jobs at lesser publicly subsidised cultural boondoggles was to promote ‘unheard voices’. In 2014, during her time at the Kiln Theatre in Kilburn, the Jewish Film Festival was cancelled after she objected to it receiving £1,400 in funding from the Israeli state – a move described as ‘officially antisemitic’ by Stephen Pollard, then-editor of the Jewish Chronicle. Rubasingham denied her actions were anti-Semitic, saying she had simply asked the festival to forgo that part of its funding which came from Israel, and that it was the festival, not her, that decided to withdraw from the event.
I loved the theatre as a kid. My interest was very much on the ‘roar of the greasepaint/smell of the crowd’ side of the business. I wanted to act, but only to say things like ‘I’m afraid there’s not much to tell, Inspector,’ or ‘We know each other too damn well, Sylvia.’ The preciousness and high seriousness of the state theatre was unknown to me.
Of the National Theatre we must again ask, whose nation?
So my first visit to the NT in 1984 when I was 16 came as a terrible shock, combining as it did (and still does) all the glitz and glamour of a municipal car park with an East German interrogation compound. And the people! I’d never felt so unwelcome and so hopelessly out of my class. They might as well have hung up a sign saying: ‘Get out you scum.’
Has anything changed? No. The eternal cycle goes on, of people like them churning out this ‘diverse’ stuff for the self-flagellating delight of the progressive posh – a rapping Shakespeare, how original! – and people like me despairing of it.
Of the National Theatre we must again ask, whose nation? The white, middle-class progressive establishment and its client pets, that’s who. It’s all so desperate. Do these people sit there and genuinely imagine they are cooking up things that will shock or even surprise anybody? ‘Innit’, Stormzy, a musical version of the godawful film Pride about gays helping out in the miners’ strike, on it goes – a horrible loop of never-ending, self-renewing, posturing rubbish.
At least back in 1984, this rarified, deracinated drivel was confined, up on its little plateau. Now it’s seeped into everything else, frothing like dirty suds over the mass media from soaps to TV commercials. It has colonised all culture. Please, make it stop. Or at least kick it back to its concrete corner.
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