The National theatre has to be the place where artists come to make their best work, and we believe these artists should be a reflection of the diversity of this country.
Our ambition is to achieve greater diversity in the areas of gender, race, disability, gender, sexuality, socio-economic background, faith and age.
As part of our plan to increase diversity on our stages by 2021, we set a number of publicly available targets to indicate our progress. As important as these targets are, they do not tell the whole story of the National’s work on diversity – we seek to create an inclusive organisation in which all people feel valued, can be themselves and feel that their voices are heard.
Our commitments:
- Set and meet targets for the directors, writers and actors on our stages
- Develop a workforce that is at least as diverse as the UK
- Support the performing arts sector in this area
- Develop a culture where diversity is hard-wired into everything we do, is understood by all of us, and where we all have an opportunity to be a part of this ongoing conversation
Our policy will evolve and develop over time as the world around us changes, and as we learn more from our work on this.
We will next update our Diversity section during autumn 2020. In the meantime, we have issued our response to the #TheatresPullUpOrShutUp industry call to action:
You can find our response here (PDF 222KB).
