by Natalie Ibu is about to make her National Theater debut directing a new play about the Brontë sisters, but the Kardashians keep trickling in. a brother no one remembers. We may not like what they stand for, but they are successful and excellent at what they do,” she says.
Ibu is well aware that some will see this as an affront to the daughters of a 19th century country clergyman, who disrupted the canon by producing some of the most important novels in the English language. She means no disrespect to them, or to those who know and respect their work, “but the idea that we can’t talk about the Kardashians in the same breath as the Brontës is a big reason I worry,” she says. “Our audience are cultural consumers who go wherever they find something they like. I want them to be fans of theater in the way that they are fans of Harry Styles.”
Charlotte changed Emily’s poetry and blocked a second printing of one of Anne’s books
Natalie Mom
It’s Monday morning the week before rehearsals properly begin, and Ibu, who walks in from his Airbnb with a takeaway coffee, has a day of pre-production consultations ahead of him. Underdog: The Other Other Brontë was put on notice when Sarah Gordon won the Nick Darke playwriting prize in 2020. And while it was very different to Ibu’s usual work – including a recent big show for young people, Protest, she thought : “Yes, we have to do this.” It is a joint production with Northern Stage, where Ibu has been artistic director for the past three years.
The underdog is Anne Brontë, who died aged just 29 after achieving the success of her two older sisters. The play explores the role sibling rivalry played in her eclipse, particularly with Charlotte, who changed Emily’s poetry, and is known to have suppressed Anne’s novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in recent years. by placing a cross on the second printing after the first edition is sold out.
In a key scene, Anne scolds her sister for mistaking her novel Agnes Gray for Jane Eyre. “Charlotte has this great line, ‘I’m telling you, the novels couldn’t be more different. Mine is weird and gothic and tough. I’m … realistic.’ She is creating a story that excuses what she has done. But he also makes an important point: that male writers tread the same ground, with endless stories about kings, and no one questions them. So why can’t two women write in the same space?”
It’s a question that resonates strongly with Ibu, who also prides herself on being a bit of an unbreakable. Why, she asks, when women make up 51% of the population, “so we’re not a minority, do we still feel marginalized – that there’s not enough space for us? And I feel that pressure across all my identities. It’s intersectional,” she says. “When you’re also black and you’re tougher and in the working class it only gets louder – that feeling that I’m not allowed to be alone because my value is only one-sided.”
Ibu, who has just turned 40, joined Northern Stage after six years at the helm of tiata fahodzi, a British-African heritage company specializing in new plays. When she started, the pandemic was still waiting, so her initial programs were online. Jim Cartwright’s first live show was 80s Road, relocated from Lancashire in the north east. “I was saying in part, ‘Your stories are my stories, too,’ and I was proud that 50% of that team was a global majority, because a global majority has been part of the story of the northeast for many years.” Other achievements include Claudia Rankine’s The White Card, about the liberal art world’s blindness to white privilege.
Born and raised in Edinburgh to a mother who was a psychiatric nurse specializing in geriatric care, Ibu had “a very active leisure life, as my mother is a single parent and I am an only child. So I think it was part of socialising, and part of the activities I had to do when my mother was working.” She joined a group of young writers at the Traverse Theatre, where she saw artistic director Philip Howard in action and, by the age of 17, decided she wanted to be an artistic director too. “There was something about his energy and the way he was in the space that made me go, ‘That’s the job I want’ – even though I didn’t really know what it was.”
Her school careers advisor steered her towards a degree in theater with arts management, which gave her a solid foundation but not in the type of theater she wanted, as it was focused on performance art. Undeterred, she applied for an Arts Council affirmative action grant and secured a trainee directorship at Nottinghamshire-based New Perspectives just as she was completing her final thesis. She attributes her individuality to her childhood. “Being the only black kid on my street, the only black kid in my school, it’s not unusual for me. So moving through a world where we’re told there aren’t many of us, it’s not as alien as it might be if I grew up in a different place or family.”
Her next ambition, she says, is about scale. “I want to reach as many people as possible because I believe theater changes people and people change the world – and scale allows me to do that,” she says. “Theatre is my activity, so why would I limit that to 50 people in a studio?”
Related: Anne Brontë: the unappreciated sister, who brought the sight to men
It’s an ambition she admits could take her out of theater altogether. “I’m not saying, ‘Goodbye, I’m out, this is my resignation via an interview in the Guardian.’ But you know, even when organizations are doing great, the theater is exclusive. It comes with rules and etiquette and a history of excluding people. It makes me wonder if I should be contacting people in their front rooms, or on their phones. Because nobody says, ‘I’m not wearing the right thing to watch Netflix.'”
This idea brings her back to the challenge of bringing three Victorian sisters back to life for as wide an audience as possible. An Instagram follower for the show presents the trio in lippy matching their silky scarlet blouses. Ibu and Gordon “squealed with glee” to see young women tagging their friends with him as a night out not to be missed. People who have long-established relationships with the Brontës are welcome, she says, but it’s just as well for the 17-year-old girl who thinks they have nothing to say to her.
“My own relationship with the Brontës began with this play – I’m very honest about that,” she says. “For a long time, I was ashamed of all the things I didn’t know: all the books I hadn’t read and the plays I hadn’t seen. I now think that is my superpower as a leader and curator of art. The kinds of things that might be seen as weaknesses are an insight: I am your audience.”
