Politics & Power Quote by Imelda Staunton

There’s a sly little mic-drop embedded in Staunton’s question: after six years in repertory, landing at the National Theatre isn’t just a job upgrade, it’s the industry’s gold standard made to sound almost casual. “Rep” carries a whole value system in British acting culture - hard miles, quick turnarounds, learning to hold a stage night after night in front of audiences who aren’t automatically on your side. It’s the unglamorous apprenticeship that quietly separates craft from hype.

Then comes “London” and “the National Theatre,” named with the kind of plainness that actually intensifies the flex. She doesn’t list roles or awards; she lists institutions. The subtext is about legitimacy: rep builds the actor, the National consecrates them. For an actress who came up before today’s hyper-accelerated fame pipelines, this trajectory reads like a moral argument about how careers should be made - through repetition, discipline, and ensemble work, not virality.

“What’s better than that?” isn’t naive; it’s performative satisfaction. It frames ambition as gratitude, while still asserting a hierarchy everyone in the profession recognizes. The rhetorical question does double duty: it invites agreement from insiders (“nothing tops it”) and gently shuts down the idea that success has to look louder, richer, or more celebrity-adjacent. In a culture that often treats theatre as a stepping-stone to screen prestige, Staunton flips the script: the pinnacle is a stage where the work is the point.