National Theatre boss denies being part of ‘left-of-centre elite’
Rufus Norris, the director of the National Theatre, has taken aim at a suggestion he is in a “left-of-centre metropolitan” bubble as he announced he is to stay in post for another five years
The Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, a Tory peer, complained over the weekend of the people who “control everything – not just the BBC … but the National Theatre, the National Gallery, the National Trust, the national this, the national that”. He said they all spoke with one voice, “a kind of Hampstead voice”, which expressed opinions as facts.
Norris rejected the criticism as he announced details of the theatre’s plans for 2020-21 on Wednesday.
“I don’t know Julian and I’ve not seen him here recently,” Norris said. “I totally dispute the idea that we’re speaking in any particular bubble.”
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He said the theatre was broadening the repertoire and would next year meet diversity targets it had set itself, including women making up half of all directors and living playwrights at the theatre, and at least 25% of performers being people of colour.
“Half the population are women, it’s a fact. If he [Fellowes] would like to argue about that, he’s welcome to come along. Our diversity targets are based on the population of this country.”
Norris said the NT’s work was increasingly nationwide, “more than the theatre has ever done. I expect that fact is not known to him because he hasn’t looked”.
Fellowes made his comments in a Sunday Times interview in which he talked about the types of people resisting inevitable social change. Once it was the grand elite walking towards the abyss, now the “quite good” run “of the left-of-centre metropolitan elite” was coming to an end.
Norris’s run at the National Theatre is definitely not coming to an end, as he revealed he had recently signed up for a second five-year term in the job.
He announced nine productions at its South Bank stages for 2020-21, which include an adaptation of Rachel Cusk’s trilogy of “Faye” novels, Outline, Transit and Kudos, and the first major revival in 35 years of the Welsh classsic The Corn is Green by Emlyn Williams.
Standing at the Sky’s Edge, a musical celebration of life on Sheffield’s Park Hill estate with songs by Richard Hawley, which premiered at the city’s Crucible theatre last year, will come to the National’s Olivier stage in January 2021.
New plays include Kerry Jackson by April de Angelis, set in a Hackney restaurant at the frontline of gentrification, and After Life by Jack Thorne, adapted from the Japanese film with characters between life and death who have to choose a memory they will live in for eternity.
There will also be a “radical” new adaptation of Racine’s Phaedra by Simon Stone and starring Kristin Scott Thomas in her NT debut, and a new production of Pearl Cleage’s Blues for an Alabama Sky, starring Giles Terera, best known as Aaron Burr in Hamilton.
Norris and executive director Lisa Burger announced that 250,000 tickets across the year would be £20 or less, increasing the quantity of low-price tickets by 25%.
He also denied reports of a rift between the theatre and its patron Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, saying there was “ongoing, very productive dialogue with the duchess and her team”.
