A great play can put audience members on the edges of their seats. A terrible play, though, can force viewers to make either a diplomatic departure during the interval or a hunched, awkward stumble through dark rows of seats towards the exit.
“I have walked out of many plays if I’m not enjoying them,” Naga Munchetty admits. “There was one particular production of King Lear I was so excited about, with a famous actor playing the lead. Lear is one of my favourite plays, but it was hammy and awful. Because of my working hours, I’m fairly tired all the time, so if I go to the theatre and it’s not grabbing my attention, I don’t want to start snoring. But also if I’m not enjoying it, I’m just not going to be there.”
As the chair of judges for the 2025 Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting—Europe’s biggest playwriting competition, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year—Munchetty has one baseline requirement for the original scripts: “Keep me engaged. I’m not saying a play has to be boom, bash, everything going crazy. I love silence.”
Despite early morning starts for her regular presenting job on BBC Breakfast, Naga spends many evenings at the theatre. Her own experiences of treading the boards are limited to roles in school productions of Singing In The Rain and Grease. “I was usually in the pit orchestra because I’m a trumpeter,” she says. “Acting isn’t my thing.” Nor is creative writing: “I don’t think I’ve got a novel or play in me.” But through her career as a journalist, she has developed a “passion for telling a story but telling it well”.
With many politicians lying brazenly and misinformation and disinformation swirling around online, journalism is in a precarious state. “There are people who would like to smother journalism,” Munchetty nods. “But there will always be a desire from people to know the truth and what’s going on in the world. We have to be mindful of disinformation and to show our workings.”
No organisation is battered by accusations of bias quite like the BBC—often charged with being simultaneously pro- and anti-Brexit, anti-Israel and anti-Palestinian, pro- and anti-Scottish independence, pro-Tory and pro-Labour… “I’m very proud of working for the BBC,” says Munchetty. “It’s highly respected. Trust is earned and I think the BBC hasn’t stopped, nor should it ever stop, trying to earn trust.”
In 2019, Munchetty was reprimanded by the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) for a breach of impartiality guidelines after her comments during a BBC Breakfast discussion about Donald Trump. The US president had told non-white Democrat politicians (Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib…) to “go back” to “the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came”—language Munchetty contextualised as “racist”. The ECU’s ruling was criticised by other journalists, presenters, BBC staff and politicians as “self-censoring” and “perplexing”.
But unlike, say, fellow BBC presenter Gary Lineker, she says she has no problem with keeping her political views to herself. “I would hope that, with any good broadcaster, you would not be biased and you would tell the story. You wouldn’t know what party I support, one: because I’m a floating voter and, two: because I like to think I’m equally rigorous with any political party and or political events. It’s not just the BBC: Channel 4, Sky, ITV... We all pride ourselves on asking questions, so people can come to their own conclusions, and challenging power without fear.”
Munchetty has also recently tackled a different topic: women’s health. Since she was a teenager, she has suffered from excruciating pain. After decades of being ignored and fobbed off by doctors, she was diagnosed in 2022 with adenomyosis, a debilitating womb condition. “Adenomyosis affects something like one in eight women, but it’s not easily diagnosed,” she tells me. “It’s very painful. I’m lucky—I was able to access private health care, but it still took me 35 years to be diagnosed. Up until then, I was told flooding, heavy periods, cramps, fainting, vomiting and passing out were all ‘normal’.”
In May, she published a non-fiction book, It’s Probably Nothing, which she hopes will contribute to a conversation about a crisis in women’s health issues, including the fact that far more funding is allocated to erectile dysfunction than to premenstrual syndrome. “There has been a perception that women are made for pain, because our bodies are designed to be able to give birth. It’s not good enough. Attitudes are changing but it’s been slow to come around.”
Without making light of her 35 years of suffering, I wonder if she’s ever seen a play that felt even more agonising or seemed to last as long. “Yes,” she laughs. “But I was able to walk out. I’m not able to walk away from my uterus.”
