'Creating Change Where it Matters the Most': Artistic Directorship and Representation in the London Theatre

Britain has changed drastically in the period since the Second World War, both in terms of the demographic make-up of its population and in terms of prevalent social attitudes, but British theatre has sometimes struggled to keep up. Despite seismic shifts such as the rise of social realism in the 1950s or the surge of feminist playwriting three decades later, the danger has never been too far away that the theatre will become—or, some would say, remain—a bastion of wealthy white male privilege, sealed off from the progress being made in wider culture. This has been an issue both in relation to the fictive realities being presented on stage and the professional power structures through which work is developed and programmed. This article responds to a significant development in this narrative of intermittent progress, a marked increase since 2010 in the number of women and people of color who hold the post of artistic director of a London theatre. In this article I welcome this development as an important and overdue advance in the capacity of British theatre to represent and speak to British society in the twenty-first century, consider how it has come about, and assess the likelihood that it will come to be a permanent change in the composition of the UK theatre industry—an essential outcome if theatre is to serve London as well in the twenty-first century as it has in the past.

The article is divided into four parts. First, after an initial discussion of unequal representation in British theatre and the particular significance of the artistic director, I quantify recent advances in representation at the artistic director level with specific reference to the mainstream subsidized theatres (such as the National Theatre and Royal Court, which are in receipt of public funding via the government body Arts Council England) where the majority of new plays produced in London are staged. Second, I identify the circumstances in which this overdue shift has taken place, considering the role played by task-focused groups such as Tonic and Artistic Directors of the Future within the wider context of structural discrimination. Third, I present two case studies intended to shed light on the kinds of challenges that artistic directors from previously under-represented groups can face: the first considers Emma Rice's brief tenure as AD at the Globe (2016–18) and the second looks at Indhu Rubasingham's re-branding of the Tricycle Theatre as the Kiln (2018). Fourth, I conclude with a sustained discussion of the situation in 2021, taking into account the shifts in the cultural narrative caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. If it can show itself to be representative and inclusive, London's theatre will continue to play a progressive role in the development of UK culture more widely; but if the gains of recent years are lost, it will slide backwards towards irrelevance.

Representation, Artistic Directorship, and Change

Although this article focuses specifically on artistic directors, the discussion of their role must be considered in the context of wider issues of representation in British theatre, culture, and society. As Dave O'Brien, Chancellor's Fellow in Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Edinburgh, authoritatively puts it, "Theatre stakes a claim to be an artform that represents and reflects society. British society is currently marked by a range of social divisions that stretch far beyond the cultural sector. As a result, inequalities in the workforce and audience for theatre should not be a surprise. British theatre and the associated performing arts industries are characterised by exclusions by gender, by race, and by class."¹ Such exclusions relate very clearly to the legacy of the past. While there has been clear movement away from the values of colonial Britain, when sexism and racism operated as organizing social principles, inherited social attitudes and institutional structures are the cause of widespread and continuing systemic discrimination through which inequalities that strongly resemble those of imperial Britain are perpetuated. [End Page...