‘The world is falling apart’: Dominic Cooke plans boldly political first season at Almeida

Exclusive: London theatre’s new artistic director working with David Tennant and Caryl Churchill as he wrestles with Britain’s decline, and with smart glasses

A spate of highly political plays will feature in one of north London’s most storied theatres next season, as its new artistic director says the world “is falling apart”.

An exploration of Britain’s decline featuring David Tennant and a searing series of new plays by Caryl Churchill are planned for Dominic Cooke’s first season at the Almeida theatre .

“It’s hard not to be political nowadays,” Cooke said of the programme. “I don’t believe in art telling people what to think but I do think that we should be putting situations on to stage, into culture, that aren’t being looked at. The world is falling apart and to not talk about that would be an abdication of responsibility.”

Cooke, who ran the Royal Court for several years, is a long-term friend of Tennant and will be directing him in a revival of John Osborne’s The Entertainer.

“I am really excited about it,” he said. “I have known David since he was a drama student; I once stayed at his flat when I was doing a show in Edinburgh. I was so taken with his rigour and his intelligence.”

He proposed the idea of putting on this play with Tennant: “I have been thinking about him doing this for a very long time. We are doing quite a radical repositioning of the play. It could really speak to our times; it deserves to be rescued. It has a lot about English identity and the empire. It’s all about that moment in the 50s when England viewed itself a second-rate power for the first time in its history.”

Cooke said this was relevant to politics in the UK today: “We have this internalised memory of ourselves as this great nation. We are just one relatively big nation in world terms. There is this atmosphere of us trying to grapple with this change. Look at Brexit: that was about us ruling the waves, and obviously we aren’t any more.”

Opening the season will be Three and a Bit, a collection of short plays by Churchill, who at 88 is “still as sharp as ever”, according to Cooke. “It’s thrilling; she is more than ever on the cutting edge, just as provocative, just as fascinating. She talks in Three and a Bit about being indifferent to suffering when it’s not on your doorstep. It arrests you and creeps up on you in a very unlikely way.”

The Almeida will be joining other theatres, as well as cinemas and pubs, in banning Meta’s new smart glasses . “They are ghastly, aren’t they? Because of the invasive nature of them, especially for women,” Cooke said. “For years people have been stopped from filming during a performance. Definitely we would crack down on them. The problem with the bloody things is they are hard to notice and crack down on.”

Stars including Cate Blanchett, Rosamund Pike and Gillian Anderson have hit the news recently for telling audience members off for filming and being distracting during performances. “It is fair for theatres to want to control the use of phones, as people have the right to decide whether they want to be filmed or not,” Cooke said. “The concentration required to give a leading performance on stage is immense, and it is easy to feel distracted if a phone goes off and there is a camera in your face.”

Another highlight of the season will be a production by the Almeida Young Company (ages 14-18), who will perform Angel to Olympus, an amalgamation myth by Flora Wilson Brown, directed by Takiyah Kamaria.

Cooke wants to work more with young talent, after cuts to school drama programmes have dried up the pool of new directors. “It is a fascinating department in the theatre, they work with every single child in the borough. These things become more and more important when the arts are being reduced in education, they are being struck from the syllabus. It is so shortsighted,” he said.

“One of the reasons I wanted the job is that I was concerned about the talent pipeline. We are trying to find ways through for emerging directors, we have a project coming down the line on that, which we will be talking more about soon. You only learn by doing, and you have to have the space to do that.”