Cooke Unveils Political First Season at Almeida — SkimNews
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- Dominic Cooke announced his first season as Almeida artistic director would be "highly political," saying "the world is falling apart" and that silence on current crises would be "an abdication of responsibility."
- David Tennant will star in a revival of John Osborne's The Entertainer, directed by Cooke, who proposed a "radical repositioning" linking the play's post-imperial themes to Brexit and modern English identity.
- The season opens with Caryl Churchill's Three and Bit, short plays by the 88-year-old dramatist, whom Cooke called "more than ever on the cutting edge, just as provocative."
- The Almeida will ban Meta's smart glasses alongside other theatres, cinemas, and pubs, with Cooke citing their invasive nature—particularly for women—and the difficulty of cracking down on them mid-performance.
- Cooke flagged concerns about the directing pipeline after school drama cuts, calling the situation "so shortsighted," and announced an upcoming project to support emerging directors.
- The Almeida Young Company (ages 14–18) will stage Angel to Olympus, a mythic piece by Flora Wilson Brown directed by Takiyah Kamaria.
Why it matters: The Almeida under Cooke pairs political programming—reviving Osborne's post-imperial Entertainer alongside new Churchill—with operational moves like banning always-on wearables in the auditorium. With school drama being "struck from the syllabus," his commitment to an emerging-director project and the Young Company represents a concrete institutional response to a documented pipeline problem.
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