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There were several big endings for Rufus Norris in 2025, all packed into a few seismic months last year. First, the end of his position as director of the National Theatre after ten years as leader. The end of the arrangement coincided with the death of his mother, who died three weeks before he left the NT. On top of that, a very important birthday to complete his 50s.
What did Norris do when he turned 60, on the other side of the Big Job, with the grief of losing a parent? DIY, a lot of kayaking and moving house, it becomes: “It was important to have a break,” he says. “I’m a workaholic, but I’m also an easy-brained bird so I can easily lose track of how to build a shed or landscape.”
But now it’s back to work with the NT premiere in Istanbul to direct the Turkish version of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. It’s a strange move, born of dislike rather than design, he explains. He was teaching a workshop at the Turkish capital’s Zorlu Performing Arts Center (PAC), an eight-level cultural center, when the center’s general manager, Filiz Ova, asked him to lead the show in its main venue. “We’ve been thinking about doing this play for a few years and it’s never been done at Zorlu PAC,” he says, adding that he was impressed by Norris’s ability to connect with people.
He approached him about six weeks before rehearsals began and Norris wrangled to form the production team, which is a mixture of different cultures including a well-known instrument maker. It’s Devlin. along with the Olivier award-winning choreographer Javier de Frutosa famous Turkish composer Oğuz Kaplangı and Deputy Director of Turkey honey snow.
Newly translated by Hira Tekindor, the play (with English surtitles) is a blockbuster in terms of casting, with several international stars playing central roles: Halit Ergenç, Known for his role as Sultan Suleiman in the TV drama of the Ottoman Magnificent Century, he plays Willy Loman, Zerrin Tekindor, as Linda Loman, is one of the leading actresses in Turkey along with Fatih Artman and Kerem Arslanoğlu who play the sons of the family.
With many Turkish and English speakers in the group, the rehearsal process was smooth. The singers are singing Norris’ praises – his public spirit, his genius, his legendary reputation. For his part, Norris saw it as an exciting trip, even if it was dangerous because of the size of the hall, which seats 2,300 people. “It’s a big, big theater for an intimate performance, so the challenge is that you have to attract the audience and find a way to enjoy the size of the space from the content of the play.”
He seems to have done a good job. It’s a haunting show that wouldn’t seem out of place on Olivier’s NT stage, famous for its family history and the actors who play so emotionally, their insecurities all the more apparent against the larger, more visible events surrounding their flesh-and-blood world.
Sitting in a central London gym, Norris is a man of liberation, embracing and excited that he can return to being himself instead of the head of a prestigious organization. There is a right to express his politics in a way that he could not.
So why did this unique, family drama fail the American dream? “Approaching any play as a director, for me, you have to ask: what is the importance of the story now? Then the question of your connection to it because if I can find something that is personal to me in the play then it’s a chance for everyone else. In this story, you can write a PhD about the American dream, but in fact this is about a person who was abandoned, and has been suffering for three years, and has been suffering for three years. The first stages of what we can now call dementia.”
That last part is particularly interesting to Norris, whose mother suffered from dementia for years before her death. My mother was sick for a long time because she had not known me for three years before she died. For him, the play shows the pain of the human condition along with the dangerous illusions of the American capitalist dream.
This gig comes almost a year after he left the NT on 1 April 2025. After that, he took a definite step away from the country he had known for years including leaving London, down to Scotland. “We’re on the sea, in Fife. The other side is where my friend (playwright Tanya Ronder) is from and we’ve been going there for the whole time we’ve been together, which is about 38 years.”
He’s still finding his way “with what this new life is,” he says, and reassessing what he wants. “There’s nowhere like National so you can’t go there. I have no desire to run another house. Personally, there’s no need to think ‘Where’s my PA?’, ‘Why am I not important anymore?’ Culture progresses and it he is to continue. That’s how healthy and important it is. Whether I can continue to give or not does not matter according to social norms. It makes me feel alive and busy and content. “
They spend time and study a lot with purpose, personal energy, to be creatively inspired. “I’ve only really read plays in the last 20 years, so it’s good to start expanding the play.” Now I can read different things, books and history books… You have to train yourself to lose yourself in a book or fake work where every 45 minutes your brain is going ‘Oh, I have to have a meeting or something’.
So do they like it? “I like not to be focused on me. It’s a relief… I’m not important. It’s good to have the freedom to make my own decisions, to mess around and enjoy the art of creativity. If I wanted to go to Istanbul and do a play I could and I did, and it was good without the scrutiny that happens when you’re in the place I was before.”
Yes, he struggles with the words in his head about the question he is in his company now. “But the nature of making theater is that we make things that people watch, and then they go home. And at the end of the run, it’s over. I know that we have developed digital photography but there is an instability that is created in its form because it is amazing. You have to be in it, in the moment. When you are not in that work, the world director says Tony, as Kush continues.”
Do they feel the need for reform, or some kind of new peer influence? “The only important pressure is to realize how much is coming from inside you. There is no set method. My directors have done different things. Some have gone freelancing (Trevor Nunn), others have gone to another house (Nicholas Hytner at the Bridge theatre) Others have turned to writing (Richard Eyre, with his first play, House of Snailsheld at the Hampstead theatre).
Norris is already trying his hand at the latter, as the head writer of a one-man play, with an actor already, he confirms, though he won’t say who. He is also working on a film and possibly another book in progress. He says he welcomes other international projects that may come. “I’m British, I’ll always be British but I didn’t grow up here” – grew up in Africa and Malaysia. “Everyone has problems, but our theater bubble is one of its own and it’s a real privilege to be invited out of it and find, look, great storytelling is everywhere, and the audience is smart, informed, aware.”
Is the willingness to work more abroad a defense against what appear to be bleak times in Britain, given the achievements of the Reformers and the country’s past success? “I think there’s always been a tendency in our island culture to have a very selective memory of our history, who built this country, what made it what it is.” When you grew up in former colonial countries, when you traveled around the world until I had the opportunity to do it and understand that, basically, people are people everywhere and they are all affected by what our country creates.
“That’s why storytelling is the right way to spend your life.” Politicians, religious leaders, journalists, snake oil salesmen – everyone uses storytelling as a way to spin their own stories. By traveling and watching other people write different stories you understand a little bit of the stories we are told at home. “
Is the story that some seem to be pushing – about Britain’s long, glorious, old history – dangerous? “Yes, I am concerned about this. Look at the Huguenots and the Russian Jews who had a great influence on this culture…be aware that some of these stories are false.”
The right to express one’s feelings.
