Dominic Cooke is an inspired choice to succeed Rupert Goold at the Almeida. He is a proven hand at directing new plays, classics and musicals. He is a very good producer who appears to rejoice in the success of his colleagues. And, at a time when the vogue is for “reimagined” versions of old plays, he is that rare figure: one who respects an author’s intentions while remaining open to new ideas. At 59 he also has an extensive list of credits without being, in words once fatuously applied to the BBC’s former head of Radio 3, John Drummond, “tainted by experience”.
As artistic director of London’s Royal Court from 2006 to 2013, Cooke showed exceptional judgment. I well remember an opening press conference where he said one of his aims was to stage plays about the aspirational middle classes. He was as good as his word with productions of Bruce Norris’s The Pain and the Itch and Clybourne Park which satirised, respectively, phoney white liberalism and bourgeois property fetishism.
But Cooke also championed a whole school of then unknown young writers including Bola Agbaje, Anya Reiss, Polly Stenham, Penelope Skinner and Mike Bartlett. And it was during his tenure that the Royal Court staged Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem now widely regarded as the best new play of the current century.
While promoting new work Cooke has also shown his skill at directing the classics, ancient and modern. I very much admired his pairing of The Winter’s Tale and Pericles for the RSC in 2006 in joint promenade productions. What he brought home with unusual clarity was the idea that Shakespeare’s late plays are quasi-religious experiences underpinned by resurrection myths: in a single day we saw Kate Fleetwood miraculously restored to life first as the secluded Hermione and then as the coffined Thaisa. His production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible reminded us of the danger of unyielding intellectual rigidity and his current West End version of Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession sensibly trims the text to highlight Shaw’s vehemently anti-capitalist message: it also reminds us in the play’s climactic mother-daughter showdown that, in a good play, everyone is right.
Imelda Staunton plays Mrs Warren and she has been a feature of Cooke’s two most successful ventures into musicals. In his outstanding 2017 National Theatre production of Follies he not only brought out Stephen Sondheim’s fascination with duality: he showed us how every character was haunted by his or her past. When Staunton’s Sally sang In Buddy’s Eyes you saw a woman filled with a deluded belief in her life-partner’s ardour: by the time she sang Losing My Mind the same woman was a lovelorn wreck on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Cooke’s recent London Palladium production of Hello Dolly! also breathed new life into a Broadway standard: Staunton sang the title song not in the usual style of a superannuated showbiz legend but in that of a cheery little soul renewing her acquaintance with the beloved haunt, and the waiters, of her youth.
Cooke has worked profitably in other media. His TV production of Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy and Richard III was excellent and his two feature films, On Chesil Beach and The Courier, both had great style. But his domain is the theatre and he will be judged at the Almeida by his ability to combine a sensitivity to the present with a respect for the past. There is every reason to hope he will not only be as good as Goold but will forge his own style.
