Latest news with #DominicCooke
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
The Almeida theatre has a coup in Dominic Cooke: this gifted director is also a proven talent spotter
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.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
Dominic Cooke appointed as the Almeida theatre's artistic director
Dominic Cooke has been appointed as the new artistic director of the Almeida theatre in London, succeeding Rupert Goold in 2026. Cooke ran the Royal Court for several years and is an in-demand director with recent hits in the West End and at the National Theatre. 'Twelve years after leaving the Royal Court, I couldn't be more excited to be returning as an artistic director and to be taking the reins of this unique theatre,' he said. He described Goold's Almeida as 'a beacon of quality and innovation' and added: 'I'm hugely grateful to him and his team to be handed an organisation in such good health. I look forward to building on this legacy and to future adventures in this magical space.' A specialist in musicals, Cooke staged a celebrated revival of Stephen Sondheim's Follies at the National in 2017 and reunited with one of its stars, Imelda Staunton, on an admired revival of Hello, Dolly! at the London Palladium last summer. His production of George Bernard Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession, starring Staunton and her daughter Bessie Carter, opened at the Palladium last month. Other West End productions directed by Cooke include Medea with Sophie Okonedo and Good with David Tennant. During his time at the Royal Court he directed plays by Caryl Churchill, Tarell Alvin McCraney and Bruce Norris. He has also directed two feature films, The Courier (starring Benedict Cumberbatch) and On Chesil Beach (adapted from Ian McEwan's novel), as well as three episodes of The Hollow Crown for television. The chair of the Almeida board Tamara Ingram said Cooke is 'celebrated around the world and brings a wealth of experience both of running a theatre and as a consistently acclaimed, award-winning artist. We are greatly looking forward to what lies ahead and to seeing how his leadership defines the next chapter of the Almeida.' Goold called it a 'wonderful appointment' and said that Cooke's tenure at the Royal Court brimmed 'with confidence and new voices'. He added that Cooke 'will bring his many talents to bear on continuing the rich story of our great theatre'. It was announced last year that Goold will leave the Almeida to run the Old Vic, replacing Matthew Warchus. The Almeida's executive director Denise Wood is also standing down to pursue freelance projects. Recruitment for Wood's successor will begin shortly.
Times
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Mrs Warren's Profession review — Imelda Staunton battles with Bernard Shaw
It's less than a year since we saw Imelda Staunton taking on polite society as the bustling matchmaker in Dominic Cooke's elegant revival of Hello, Dolly! at the London Palladium. Now here she is at the Garrick, back in harness with Cooke and playing a character who makes a much more dubious living out of human frailties. George Bernard Shaw's study of Kitty Warren, a successful brothel keeper who is trying to build a relationship with her bluestocking daughter, caused a scandal in its time. Treating sex as a business like any other put the playwright at odds with the guardians of morals: it wasn't until 1925 that London saw a public performance, three decades after the play was written. The problem now, of course,
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Mrs Warren's Profession review – Imelda Staunton in formidable form as brothel-keeper
This is not the first production of George Bernard Shaw's once-banned 1893 play about a mother-daughter reckoning to cast a real-life mother and daughter. Caroline and Rose Quentin performed it together at Theatre Royal Bath in 2022. Imelda Staunton and Bessie Carter here make a more compelling double act and bring an added frisson to the play's intimacies and disputes. Carter plays Vivie, a no-nonsense young woman with ambitions to take up the legal profession. Her mother, Kitty (Staunton), has a successful profession of her own – the world's oldest – and a string of brothels to her name. When Kitty visits Vivie, who has just graduated from Cambridge, this secret is explosively revealed. You can see why it was originally banned by the Lord Chamberlain. If Victorians were shocked by the theme of sex work, its ideological grenades about the corruptions of capitalism and establishment hypocrisies still resonate today. Some go off in director Dominic Cooke's period-dress production, which he has edited for sleekness. It feels abidingly faithful but moves stiffly at times, carrying the sense of a dusted down drama despite Chloe Lamford's shining set, an island of flora and fauna bobbing like an eternally fragrant English garden against a bare black backdrop, before being stripped of its naturalism. The period dress strangely mutes the play's shocks while, in an awkward touch, lugubrious ghostly figures in undergarments (Victorian sex workers?) crowd around the edges and act as stagehands. It is never staid when Staunton is on stage, though. Both mother and daughter give dignified performances, Staunton the more subtle and formidable with an edge of the dandy while Vivie is plainer and more upright. The play flares fully to life in their duologues but the scenes around them feel filled with extraneous, thinly drawn characters and plot. Mr Praed (Sid Sagar) seems redundant to the drama as a whole while the reverend's self-serving son, Frank (Reuben Joseph), sounds like a pale imitation of Oscar Wilde's shallow men. Sir George Crofts (Robert Glenister, excellent) appears every bit the arrogant 'capitalist bully' that Vivie accuses him of being, although his defence implicates society and Vivie's privilege too, while the Reverend (Kevin Doyle) is fabulously performed, bumbling, comic and venal. This is, in large part, a static play of ideas, but the arguments are nuanced. Sex work is not an immoral act in itself but symptomatic of the exploitation of – and limits put upon – working women, it is suggested. Capitalism, high society and the church are implicated, and damned. The script's intellectual restlessness is still enlivening too; the mother-daughter battles are excellent, twisting and switching our sympathies. Kitty, by turns, seems selfish and honest, Vivie puritanical and moral. Generation and class clashes are also at play alongside existential guilt and rebellion, as well as reflections on mothers and daughters' rights over and responsibilities to each other. Shaw shows himself to be well ahead of his time in capturing all of this and his arguments still hold a grip, even if it comes off like a Wilde play without the jokes. At the Garrick theatre, London, until 16 August
Gulf Today
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
Off the page
For Hollywood, books can be one the best places to find inspiration for a new film. However, the written word does not always get translated onto the big screen so nicely. This week we are taking a look at some of those book-to-movie adaptations that did not quite go to plan leaving audiences disappointed. The novel 'On Chesil Beach' was written by British writer Ian McEwan back in 2007. The book did very well and was even chosen for the 2007 Booker Prize shortlist. In 2017, director Dominic Cooke decided to bring the love story to life on the big screen with actors Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle. The film was heavily criticised even down to the actors make-up. Writer Louis de Bernières's novel 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin' was a big literary success in the 90s. In 2001 the film version was made with director John Madden at the helm. Even the casting of two of the biggest actors of the time, Nicholos Cage and Penélope Cruz, couldn't save it. Critics went to town on the film claiming it had lost all traces of the novel's heart and soul with the lead actors lacking chemistry. In other news this week, turn to our Fitness pages to read about how to up your walking game to get fitter faster. According to an exercise scientist, the popular goal of hitting 10,000 steps a day is more effective if we increase our walking speed. Apparently walking with more enthusiasm has huge benefits on our blood glucose and blood sugar.
