Meet Indhu Rubasingham, Now the Most Powerful Woman in British Theater

For a moment, Indhu Rubasingham stops speaking, catches her breath, blinks back tears. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “I get emotional. But I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for my dad. He would be so blown away that I got this job.”

She pauses again, waving her hand in front of her face to chase away the emotion. The artistic director designate of the National Theatre, the first woman and the first person of color ever to be appointed to the most important position in British theater, is talking about her father, who died 14 years ago.

A.S. Rubasingham was an eye specialist who had moved to the UK from Sri Lanka and who had high hopes that his daughter might follow him into medicine. Born in Sheffield, England, she grew up in the East Midlands town of Mansfield; she was good at science and math, and took all science A levels at Nottingham Girls’ High School, when suddenly theater caught her heart.

“He was worried about me doing a drama degree, but he was really good at listening and was very broad-minded. Compared to other friends, looking back, I realize that I was allowed to be myself. We were always encouraged to have the discussion, though he was very apprehensive about the lack of jobs. I remember once I did a warehouse show, and people were sitting on cushions, and they thought I’d really gone downhill because there weren’t any proper theater seats. But then [the director] Peter Brook came to see it. And so that was OK. That was funny.”

She laughs, warmly and loudly, full of pride and affection. Now 54, and set to become one of the most powerful women in British arts, to say nothing of the global theater scene, programming, fundraising and overseeing hundreds of staff and creatives from the organization’s three-theater brutalist concrete icon on the South Bank of the River Thames, a potentially daunting task lies ahead of her. This is, after all, the theater founded in 1963 with Laurence Olivier as its director. Many of its productions are the stuff of legend. The first starred Peter O’Toole in Hamlet; more recent juggernauts include War Horse and Hadestown, while this spring the Sam Mendes-directed drama The Motive and the Cue, about Richard Burton, John Gielgud, and Elizabeth Taylor, will also transfer to Broadway.