This interview with Indhu Rubasingham, the new artistic director at the Tricycle Theatre, first appeared on Words of Colour online in September/October 2010
Acclaimed theatre director Indhu Rubasingham is full of surprises. After a childhood aspiration for a pop career and the possibility of studying law, Indhu opted to study drama at university. An Arts Council bursary led to an Assistant Director role at Theatre Royal Stratford East. Today she is one of the country’s most prolific theatre directors. Not one to be pigeon-holed, Indhu has a tendency to establish exciting and fruitful collaborations with actors such as Jenny Jules, writers including African-American Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage, and theatres, particularly the Tricycle. Indhu tells Joy Francis why she is a theatre-maker, how she thrives on variety and that she may, one day, produce a musical.
You’ve been quoted as wanting to be a pop star and thinking you’d be a lawyer. Have you incorporated any of those skills and aspirations into your current role?
[Laughs] The thing with that quote is that I was a kid who didn’t know what I wanted to do. I wouldn’t say either of those professions were a serious consideration. I remember watching the TV show The Kids from Fame. It was those kinds of programmes on TV and film that made me seize on the idea of theatre.
Are you alluding to a future direction in musical theatre?
[Laughs] What is interesting is that my taste is varied. I love musicals and opera and where music can take you as an audience is magical. I’d never say never. You say you were bullied into directing The Ramayana at the Birmingham Rep.
How?
When it was offered to me I was reluctant at first. I didn’t want to take on this Asian story. I wanted to do a big Shakespearean or Greek tragedy. The irony is that it was an incredible opportunity for a director at that stage of my career. It allowed me to express and explore myself as a theatre director. I was given a 900-seater theatre and a blank canvas. There wasn’t an existing script and I had to choose who I wanted to collaborate with. I had to find out who I was as an artist and a theatre director.
Did you surprise yourself?
It is one of the scariest things that I have done. What doesn’t break you makes you. I learned huge amounts. It was a piece of theatre that incorporated new writing, physical theatre and dance. It was a total theatre experience. And I had to lead a large team.
You produced Women Power and Politics at the Tricycle Theatre not long after the general election. Four months on, have any predictions come to light based on the season’s plays?
Nothing has emerged for me in the political scheme of things. I think in time things will change. We have been going for so long in a blinked state. What I noticed with the theatre piece is that it is part of the Zeitgeist – people are talking about it in newspapers and magazines. I read an article that said it will take 50 years for women to get pay equal to men. It is an area that people are not keeping quiet about anymore and that is important. Doing the plays opened my eyes again as it went off the agenda for the past 10 to 15 years.
Moving from the world of politics to theatre, what about the lack of female theatre directors, particularly women of colour? Have we moved on?
I don’t really like commenting on the politics of my industry. I’d rather show it through my work. From early in my career I was asked to be quite political and talk about these things by funding bodies. It was far too early in my career [to do this] because there were so few of us. I would rather you allow me to be an artist as you would with every one of my contemporaries. This is a pressure that is put on black artists to be representative and political before they explore their voices artistically. I don’t want to undermine the political, it is very important, but if I wanted to be a politician I would have gone into politics. I think the fact that there are so few people of colour in power shows where were we are not compared to other industries.
You are drawn to topics on women, sexual and racial politics and internationalism as highlighted by Ruined and Free Outgoing. Why is theatre such a good medium for these complex issues?
Theatre is a place of ideas and is a medium of emotional connections. The combination of these two things allows you to tackle complex subjects that make them engaging at an emotional level. Film can engage with the emotional and newspapers the intellectual. Theatre can, when done well, take a complex idea and make us feel something about it, and makes us engaged with the idea, people, culture or issue in different ways.
Lynn Nottage is a writer you have worked with on more than one occasion – with Fabulation and Ruined. What is it about her plays that capture you?
Theatre is a collaborative medium. It is about human engagement and the engagement between the audience member and the live actor. It is not one person who is responsible. When you form a bond or meet an artist that you like, have similarities with and you are on the same journey as, it is like finding water in a desert. It is about the connection with Lynn as a person and what she wants to achieve. I have also worked with Jenny Jules more than once. When you find those connections, they feel very powerful and you want to continue those relationships. To find fellow artists on the same wavelength as you is liberating – and not very common.
Your production of Ruined at the Almeida, about the systematic rape of women as a weapon in the civil war in the Congo, is one of the best plays I have ever seen. Were you confident that people in the UK would get it and connect to it?
I am never confident. I never know. What was really important for me with Ruined was that we were absolutely paying justice to the women who Lynn interviewed. What I was concerned about was that we didn’t know what type of audience we would get. It was about how to make them engage with this subject and not distance themselves from it. It was also really important that we didn’t judge these characters. It is difficult to come from a country that is a nanny state as in the UK to understand that there is no structure and support for these women. As we don’t know their experience you cannot make a judgement about those characters unless you walked in their shoes. The lack of judgement was important to me.
Do you think that was achieved?
Yes. Members of the Congolese community came to see the play. They assumed the actors were from the Congo. That’s when you know that you are on track when the community you are talking about say that you have got it spot on. The way people were affected let me know we had tapped into something.
Any chance of another production of Ruined?
I’d love to restage it with those actors and the team who bought that show together. It was a fantastic play. It would be great.
Tricycle is where most of your work has been performed and where you aren’t just a director but a theatre-maker. What’s the appeal?
I worked with Nick [Nicolas Kent] on The Great Game [about Afghanistan] last year. After that he offered me Women Power and Politics. I’ve always been committed to new writing and Nick has this passion about politics so it was a great meeting between the two of us artistically. He goes, okay 12 plays about Afghanistan. You would think this would be a disaster. No one will come to see it as it was staged at the beginning of the recession. Yet it did really well – hats off to him. He then said, I think we should do something about women, power and politics. It’s that ability to programme at the right moment. It is all him and had nothing to do with me. Women Power and Politics was a great opportunity to produce, commission and make that happen.
How have you’ve managed to avoid being pigeon-holed?
I’ve never wanted to be pigeon-holed. It’s the natural rebel in me. I was told you should do this and do that. Why are all these white men telling me what to do? It wasn’t what got me into theatre. I’m into unheard voices and those outside of the British experience, or those that have been caught in the fringes. I believe in those voices being part of the mainstream.
What advice would you give to new writers and first time directors about how to manage their career?
It is a really hard profession. The main advice I would give is that if you really want to do it, work out why you want to do it and what you want to say. What is your individual voice, not what you think other people want you to say or be? Be true to yourself. I know that sounds crass and clichéd but it is really important. To achieve this you may feel that you have to be a lot of things to a lot of people. The hardest lesson to learn is that you can only follow your own path. Tenacity is as important as opportunity. It is the staying power – how long you stick at it – that will also allow opportunities to arise.