The State of the National
The National Theatre barely sleeps. The last bar staff leave the hulking building on the south bank of the River Thames in Central London at 3 a.m. The first goods trucks arrive at 6 a.m.
Rufus Norris doesn’t sleep much either. All artistic directors are plate spinners, but being in charge of the National, which employs about 4,000 people, is particularly demanding. Norris is the closest thing British theater has to a prime minister, and he takes ultimate responsibility for the National’s programming, staffing, live broadcasts to cinemas, education programs, partnerships with regional theaters, development, donors, and media relations. The job is all-consuming: His first meeting often starts at 8:30 a.m., and he usually stays late to watch a performance. Bad luck if it’s a weighty European classic or one of the longer Shakespeare plays; he won’t make it home until midnight. (His “red line” is the weekend every month when he visits his mother, who has dementia. “That’s the one thing that’s completely sacrosanct,” he told me.)
Leading the National Theatre is a tough job because everyone’s a critic, even the playwrights and directors who spend their life moaning about actual critics. Their demands can be loud, raucous, and difficult to reconcile—much like those of British voters. In British theater, just as in Britain overall, the past decade has been a time of austerity. The National is the flagship of the country’s subsidized theater sector, and public money is supposed to allow it to take risks and nurture unproven talent. But its state grant has been cut by 30 percent in real terms since 2010. Further reductions are expected under the newly reelected Conservative Party, which is traditionally skeptical of government funding for art, and is considering the abolition of the government department responsible for culture.
The National has also been battered by questions about its priorities. Like the Brexit debate, this has a populist dimension. Should it be making big hits, or “important” work? Should it be reaching out to audiences around the country, or drawing them toward its London home? Are minority and women artists getting enough opportunities? Is the audience too white, too old, too rich? And then there’s Brexit itself, which has exposed a division in values right down the middle of the country. How can British theater—an industry filled with people who voted to remain in the European Union—make art that speaks to and represents the 52 percent who voted to leave?
All this boils down to a single, fundamental question: Is the National Theatre primarily an artistic project, or a social one? As it happens, the Arts Council, which doles out the state’s money, has inadvertently created a—rather than the previous standard of “excellence.”
