Rupert Goold, as director, has made the Almeida the most consistently exciting theatre in London over the last decade. Next year he will take over the Old Vic and the portents look promising. At the Almeida, Goold’s programming has combined respect for new writing with a highly imaginative approach to the classics. Although a fine director himself, Goold has nurtured younger talents with no sign of professional jealousy: Robert Icke, whose Oedipus is now in the West End, and Rebecca Frecknall, who will join Goold at the Old Vic, are two beneficiaries of his enlightened encouragement.
I first became aware of Goold’s gifts, as director and head of a theatre, when he ran the Royal & Derngate, Northampton, from 2002 to 2005. Even though I wasn’t crazy about his Hamlet, set in a world of Paris existentialism, it managed to attract a star presence in Jane Birkin to play Gertrude. Goold’s Othello, in which Ron Cephas Jones’s hero became a second world war general and Finbar Lynch’s Iago a closeted homosexual, was, however, instantly striking. Over the next few years, whether running the Headlong company or working as a freelance, Goold proved himself, along with Stephen Daldry, to be a director whose work you wouldn’t want to miss.
In the productions he did at Chichester and Stratford-upon-Avon, Goold showed that he was an audacious innovator who had a high regard for actors – he is, indeed, married to one in Kate Fleetwood – and a reverence for living writers. With Patrick Stewart in the lead, he did a trio of memorable Shakespeare productions: a Tempest set in an Arctic wasteland; a Macbeth that invoked the brutality of Soviet tyranny; and a Las Vegas-based Merchant of Venice in which Stewart’s multimillionaire Shylock was confronted by Susannah Fielding’s gameshow host Portia. But Goold’s exuberant theatricality worked equally well in his 2009 production of Lucy Prebble’s Enron: the collapse of the Texas energy company was made visible by the creation of ever-smaller boxes to symbolise the way mounting debts were funnelled into fantasy companies. Thus capitalism was wittily shown to be a con trick and an illusion.
The big question, when he took over the Almeida in 2013, was whether Goold could harness his talents into running a theatre which had already acquired an international reputation under Ian McDiarmid and Jonathan Kent. In fact, he did so with great success. He kicked off with a gaudy musical version of American Psycho but quickly showed his sensitivity to the writer’s intentions.
His production of Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III, which posited the idea of a young Prince Harry falling in love with a republican outsider, was a model of dignified restraint. Goold showed a similar respect, if more free invention, in his productions of James Graham’s Ink, David Farr’s The Hunt (based on a Thomas Vinterberg movie) and Peter Morgan’s Patriots, which dealt brilliantly with the rise and fall of a Russian oligarch.
But Goold has also ensured that the Almeida is a place open to experiment and re-imagined versions of the classics. I am not an uncritical admirer of Icke, but his productions of Hamlet with Andrew Scott and The Doctor with Juliet Stevenson were bold, inventive and popular successes that, like much of the Almeida’s work, enjoyed commercial transfers. Frecknall has also made her mark with outstanding productions of Summer and Smoke and A Streetcar Named Desire that stripped Tennessee Williams’s plays of physical realism while retaining their essential poetry. More recently, Eline Arbo’s production of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, which showed a Frenchwoman’s life portrayed by five actors, garnered critical superlatives and, like much of the Almeida’s work, will move to the West End.
With the help of Denise Wood as executive director – also scheduled to leave next year – Goold has ensured the Almeida is artistically rich and financially stable. Although he was passed over for the top job at the National – despite his recent success there with Dear England – he should, if his past record is anything to go by, make waves on the Waterloo Road and give his monolithic neighbour on the South Bank a good run for its money.
