Indhu rubasingham biography of michael

Indhu Rubasingham is Artistic Director and Co-Chief Executive of Britain’s National Theatre.

Born in Sheffield of Sri-Lankan Tamil parents, she graduated from Hull University with a BA Hons in Drama.

Indhu Rubasingham is a theatre director based in London, and became Artistic Director and Co-Chief Executive of the National Theatre in Spring 2024.

She was previously the Artistic Director of Kiln Theatre.

Appointed Artistic Director of Kiln Theatre in 2012, she repositioned the company’s mission to bring unheard voices into the mainstream. The mainstay of her programming consists of both world and British premieres. During her tenure, she oversaw a £9 million major capital refurbishment, future proofing the theatre for the next generation of theatre-makers, reopening in 2018 as Kiln Theatre. Rubasingham also spearheaded a major expansion of creative engagement work, putting the company’s commitment to the local community and emerging artists at the very core of the theatre’s output. In recognition of this work, and their post-covid reopening season, Kiln Theatre won The Stage 2021 Award for London Theatre of the Year.

Her inaugural production as Artistic Director of Kiln Theatre was the multi-award-winning Red Velvet by Lolita Chakrabarti (Evening Standard Award and Critics’ Circle Award), which later transferred to St Ann’s Warehouse in New York, and to the Garrick Theatre as part of Kenneth Branagh’s season. Her production of Handbagged by Moira Buffini won an Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre, before transferring to the West End and Washington DC and embarking on a subsequent UK tour in 2015. Her production of The Invisible Hand was nominated for an Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre in both 2017 and 2021.

Indhu directed best-selling author Zadie Smith’s debut play The Wife of Willesden at Kiln Theatre in 2021 to critical acclaim—it became the highest ever grossing show in the theatre’s

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 legen