It’s succession season at the UK’s National Theatre with Rufus Norris, the institution’s Artistic Director, announcing that he will step down in 2025 after a decade in the post.
“It’s good to keep leadership evolving,” Norris noted during a press conference at the National’s base on the south side of the River Thames, in the shadow of Waterloo Bridge.
The National’s board will determine Norris’s successor. They will cast a net far and wide and there’s an eagerness to end the white male hold on the NT’s leadership.
Meanwhile, Norris has been getting on with the business of running the country’s flagship theatre company.
Succession star Harriet Walter returns to the NT to lead a new adaptation by Alice Birch of Federico Garcia Lorca’s The House of Bernardo Alba.
It will be directed by Rebecca Frecknall, the director lauded for her acclaimed revival of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire starring Paul Mescal and Patsy Ferran. The Lorca drama will play in the National’s Lyttelton Auditorium from November 16 through January 6.
Norris will direct a new play by Tim Price called Nyestaring Michael Sheen (Best Interests, The Queen) as Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevin, regarded as the ‘father’ of Britain’s National Health Service. It plays in the Olivier from next February.
David Oyelowo (Selma) will play Shakespeare’s tragic war hero, Coriolanus, in a production that Lyndsey Turner will direct on the Olivier stage next year. Norris took pride in noting that Oyelowo started his thespian career in a youth group at the NT.
Other star names set to tread the NT’s boards include Lindsay Duncan (His Dark Materials, Sherwood) leading a revival of Dodie Smith’s Dear Octopus, to be directed by Emily Burns in the Lyttelton from next February.
Jo Martin (Doctor Who) and Hayley Squires (I, Daniel Blake) will star in Death of England: Closing Time by Clint Dyer and Roy Williams, the final chapter of the celebrated Death of England series of plays.
Director Ian Rickson will stage Ben Power’s version of Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend with songs by PJ Harvey and Power. Sex Education’s Bella Maclean will star with Ami Tredrea. Show runs at the Lyttelton from April, 2024.
Norris also confirmed the Breaking Baz exclusive that Jack Thorne’s smash hit play The Motive and the Cue, directed by Sam Mendes, will transfer to the Noel Coward Theatre from December 9. The play, about when John Gielgud directed Richard Burton in Hamlet on Broadway, continues at the National until July 15.
The original cast of Johnny Flynn as Burton, Mark Gatiss as Gielgud, and Tuppence Middleton portraying Elizabeth Taylor, will continue to stay with the production when it moves to the Noel Coward.
Standing at the Sky’s Edge, which won the Olivier award for best new musical, also moves into the West End where it will play at the Gillian Lynne Theatre from February 8, following successful runs at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield and the National.
The NT and Various Productions co-production features songs by Richard Hawley and a book by Chris Bush. The show’s directed by Robert Hastie, Sheffield Theatres’ artistic chief.