A very mentally lazy artwork

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.’

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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.


Gareth Roberts
Gareth Roberts is a TV scriptwriter and novelist.