Rupert Goold is suddenly everywhere at the moment. This week he directs Pete Postlethwaite as King Lear in Liverpool before it comes to London's Young Vic in January, while his productions of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author and Pinter's No Man's Land are both now running in the West End, after transferring from Chichester and Dublin respectively.
Next month he puts a new sheen on Sam Mendes's 1993 London Palladium production of Oliver!; next year he'll make his National Theatre debut with JB Priestley's Time and the Conways; and in 2010 he will direct Romeo and Juliet for the RSC in his first production as a new associate director there, all the while continuing his duties as artistic director for Headlong Theatre.
Though he appears to have been suddenly fast-tracked for success, his current star status has actually been slowly earned. It's only in the last year, since his Chichester production of Macbeth, starring Patrick Stewart in the title role (and his own wife, Kate Fleetwood, as Lady M), travelled the world and swept up multiple awards, that he has truly come into his own as one of the most sought-after directors in Britain.
Before that, he served a traditional apprenticeship, from Cambridge undergrad to Donmar trainee director (under Mendes) – though he has admitted it didn't necessarily go as well as he'd hoped. "Around the times of the mid-90s when in-yer-face theatre was hitting in, it wasn't a great time to be called Rupert from Cambridge," he said in one interview. Instead, he was, in his own phrase, "pinged out into the regions" - first as associate at Salisbury, then artistic director at Northampton. Now 36, he's been at it for 13 years now; by contrast, Sir Peter Hall and Trevor Nunn – both also Cambridge men – were respectively running the Arts Theatre at 25 (then founding the RSC at 29), and the RSC at 28.
His moment may have taken a while to arrive, but it is no accident. This has been a carefully-controlled career trajectory in which he has made his mark with radical but rigorous reinventions of the classics (just as Stephen Daldry once did).
Daldry's calling card was his National Theatre reclamation of Priestley's An Inspector Calls, so it is probably no coincidence that Goold has chosen a Priestley to debut with there too. A new interpretation of an old warhorse makes explicit what the director's own contribution is.
Recently he suggested that part of the reason for his delayed ascent is that he is part of "a good generation of directors" - including Rufus Norris, Marianne Elliott, Dominic Cooke and Thea Sharrock - who took "too long to be given our head because there was a generation that wouldn't let go".
Of course there's no set timetable to success, and no automatic right for the younger generation to succeed an older one who are still producing the goods. The innovations of a Goold, Norris or Elliott need to be accommodated alongside the achievements of a generation of brilliant senior directors like Howard Davies, Nunn or Nick Hytner. It's also worth noting the rise of other younger directors, like Michael Grandage and Sam West, who focus on serving the text, and provide a different kind of challenge altogether to Goold's brand of barnstorming.
