Rupert Goold, the outgoing artistic director of the Almeida theatre in London, has just announced his final programme, which he hopes captures the “spirit and values” of his past 12 years at its helm. Does it?
Comprising 10 productions and four world premieres, it does contain all the signature-marks of Goold’s tenure: a smattering of star names (including Josh O’Connor and Romala Garai, the former the American classic, Golden Boy, the latter in a version of A Doll’s House by Anya Reiss); a big-ambition project with Jack Holden’s adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker prize winning novel, The Line of Beauty, about 1980s gay life (how do you turn Hollinghurst’s glorious prose into glorious theatre? We’ll see this autumn, I suppose); and a revival of the musical thriller American Psycho, based on Bret Easton Ellis’s book, which featured in Goold’s first programme at the Almeida in 2013, and brings a nice circularity to this last one. A play about masculine psychopathy, it is in the mould of previous musicals that combined hard-edged subject matter with song, from Spring Awakening, featuring teen depression, rape and suicide, to the rise and fall of a TV evangelist, Tammy Faye (both of which Goold directed).
