The Southbank landmark has revealed its 2027 programming slate, and Indhu Rubasingham is leaving no one in any doubt about where her priorities lie. Eight new plays sit within the 18-production roster, two of them commanding the cavernous Olivier stage — including a James Graham drama centred on John Major’s rise after Thatcher, and Moira Buffini’s The Great Indaba, which traces the birth of the Good Friday agreement. It is a season that announces, once more, Rubasingham’s conviction that new writing is the lifeblood of British theatre.
A Season Built on Risk
The programming signals a deliberate swing toward the untested. Alongside the Graham and Buffini premieres, audiences can expect Punchdrunk’s return to the National more than ten years after the cult phenomenon of The Drowned Man, with Ghostlight — curated by Lucy Kirkwood — marking half a century inside Denys Lasdun’s brutalist shell. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, born at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1966, gets a revival headed by Mawaan Rizwan and SNL’s George Fouracres.
And then there is the centrepiece everyone will be talking about: a revival of West Side Story, landing on the Olivier stage next Christmas with Jerome Robbins’ original choreography intact. Its more experimental companion piece, Glorious Madness — a new musical by Iman Qureshi built around Joan Armatrading’s songs — will occupy the Dorfman Theatre.
Rubasingham describes this balance as essential. “Fundamentally, it’s always about putting on something you think audiences will want to come and see,” she says. “The cost of living is so high, audiences want to know that something’s going to be OK before they invest in it.” Tentpole shows subsidise the daring ones, and she is honest about the tightrope.
The Case for New Writing
Her crusade for fresh voices was cemented earlier this year, when she delivered the 2026 Jennie Lee lecture — a new annual address honouring Britain’s first arts minister — armed with figures that were hard to ignore. The past decade has seen a 44 per cent fall in new plays staged outside London, a 30 per cent decline within the capital, and a 76 per cent collapse in new writing festivals. Conservative theatremaking, she argued, would do nothing less than “kill the future of theatre.”
Rubasingham has already acted on her words. Her inaugural production last September, Bacchae, was a rewrite of Euripides by debut playwright Nima Taleghani — the first first-time writer ever to fill the Olivier’s 1,000 seats. She called it “a statement of intent.” The Independent described it as “full-bodied theatre, rich with invention, intriguing themes and visual sumptuousness.”
Her own path into this conviction was shaped in Nottingham, where she cut her teeth as a young director. “When I was coming up in theatre in the late Nineties, early Noughties, there was so much new writing going on,” she recalls. “It’s just what most London theatres were doing — the Bush, Soho Theatre, the Tricycle, Stratford East, Hampstead. And there were audiences for it. Fringe theatre felt alive and kicking.”
Star Power and the Politics of Casting
Rubasingham has proved adept at attracting marquee names back to the stage. Emilia Clarke headlines a revival of David Hare’s Plenty, directed by former NT artistic director Richard Eyre, while Emma Corrin takes on Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer. Cate Blanchett, Letitia Wright and Sandra Oh have already graced the National’s bill, with Paul Mescal set for a return and a project with Stormzy still in development.
The casting strategy is not merely promotional — it is existential. “Star casting has always helped bring audiences to shows,” Rubasingham acknowledges. “A play with a musical just takes a couple of years to get there.”
Yet the season also includes a pointed response to recent criticism. David Hare has accused the National of “eroding culture” by abandoning the repertory system after Covid and chasing West End transfers. Rubasingham dismisses it as “water off a duck’s back.” “Everyone’s going to have an opinion about the National,” she says. “Someone once said to me the thing about the National is everyone wants to love it or hate it. I’d rather that than apathy, because it means it’s relevant.”
Phones, Failure, and the Future
Practical questions about theatregoing habits also come under her gaze. When asked about banning phones, Rubasingham is firm: “I don’t think you can and I don’t think you should. People might need them for personal reasons.” She notes that turning devices off has become an ingrained habit for most audience members, and the National will not introduce a ban under her watch.
Equally central to her philosophy is the acceptance of failure. “We’ve got to be allowed to fail,” she insists. “Is that critical response, or box office response? I think theatre is very hard to really fail in. Something might be completely panned, but does that mean an audience doesn’t enjoy it, or a writer or an actor learns their craft?”
The National’s box office, she reports, is “doing really well” — audiences are turning up, hungry for live experiences in a fragmented digital age.
Why it Matters
Rubasingham’s second season is more than a programming announcement — it is a referendum on whether Britain’s flagship theatre can sustain its founding mission in an era of cost-of-living pressure and shrinking arts funding. With new play development in freefall outside the capital and a generation of writers struggling for stage time, the choices made on the Southbank ripple outward into every regional venue, every drama school, every aspiring playwright watching from the wings. If the National retreats entirely into safe bets, the pipeline dries up. If it champions risk while keeping the lights on, it proves that the old model still works — and offers a blueprint the rest of the sector can follow.
