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.
