The Stage

Josie Rourke and Kate Pakenham: The new recruits

Published Thursday 26 January 2012 at 12:56 by Alistair Smith

As Josie Rourke and Kate Pakenham begin their new jobs at the Donmar, they talk to Alistair Smith about how they intend to make their marks at the Covent Garden venue

Alittle over a decade ago, Josie Rourke and Kate Pakenham both launched their careers in theatre at the Donmar Warehouse. Rourke’s first job in theatre was at the Donmar - on the venue’s resident assistant director scheme during Sam Mendes’ tenure. During her year there as a ‘RAD’ (the 2000/2001 season) she first worked with Michael Grandage, whom she has just succeeded as Donmar artistic director.

Today, she and Pakenham (recently appointed executive director of the venue) are sat discussing their new tenure in a spare room at the Jerwood Studios, during Rourke’s lunch break from rehearsals for her inaugural production - The Recruiting Officer.

“It’s rather wonderful because one of my strongest memories from that time was my first day of rehearsals with Sam, which was in space three at the Jerwood,” she says. “That’s the space I’m rehearsing the Recruiting Officer in. I was looking across the room a couple of weeks ago at the resident assistant director and thinking there’s a beautiful circle being formed.”

For Rourke, then, her appointment at the Donmar represents a very clear homecoming. But Pakenham also holds a serendipitous connection to both the Covent Garden venue and Rourke. Pakenham was working in TV when she attended a first night party at the Donmar for Sam Mendes’ 2000 production of To the Green Fields Beyond, on which Rourke was acting as assistant director. The pair didn’t meet each other at the party, but Pakenham did meet Sally Greene, chief executive of the Old Vic, who convinced her to leave television and set up a new development department at the Old Vic.

“I met Sally Greene and I didn’t know who she was,” recalls Pakenham. “I was just coming out of a TV job and I was meant to be going onto a cruise ship to film a docusoap. And Sally said, ‘Come and work for me at the Old Vic for six months and I can put you off theatre and you can go back to telly’. And so I went for six months and set up Old Vic New Voices. I asked what my job was and she just said, ‘I want young people, fresh blood in the Old Vic’. She always said you can do whatever you want, as long as you can raise all the money.”

Pakenham spent the next 11 years at the Old Vic, moving from the Old Vic New Voices programme to become first an associate producer and then principal producer for the theatre. She and Rourke, who had been contemporaries at Cambridge but never crossed paths, ended up meeting through the very scheme that Pakenham had been brought in to set up.

One of the key aspects of the New Voices programme was the 24 Hour Plays initiative, which Pakenham launched to help fund the other development work undertaken by the scheme. Rourke has directed one of the 24-hour productions every year since its inception.

“In a funny way, Old Vic New Voices was set up by me because I was a young producer (although I really hadn’t earned the title) coming into the industry in some senses selfishly to build my own relationships with directors, actors and writers, my contemporaries,” says Pakenham. “That’s the point of it, because it’s not funded, it has to be about the self-supporting nature of emerging talent, they can look to each other. Here we are, ten years on, it has worked.”

“There’s been a continuous mini-creative association with Kate,” explains Rourke, “both directing the plays and just chatting with her about the writers that the Old Vic were working with on the programme. And we’ve had a long term aspiration to try to join forces in a more considered fashion.”

“For more than 24 hours a year,” adds Pakenham.

Which, of course, brings us to the pair’s current long-term collaboration at the Donmar.

“I think we share taste and we complement each other,” says Pakenham. “I am a huge fan of Josie’s work and we share an idea of what theatre is and why it’s important on a basic level. And also I think we come from different places in lots of ways, which I know is hugely helpful to me. And there’s a real honesty in our relationship.”

Rourke points out that they come from very different backgrounds - both outside and within theatre. Rourke has developed her career through the subsidised sector with the Donmar, the Royal Court, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National and as artistic director of the diminutive Bush Theatre. Last summer’s West End revival of Much Ado About Nothing was her first commercial production. Meanwhile, Pakenham has worked in commercial television followed by the much larger (and non-subsidised) Old Vic.

Still, both have an obvious passion for developing talent, so it’s no surprise that many of their early plans for the Donmar revolve around that side of the operation. Rourke, in particular, is keen to underline that she has benefitted from the schemes and training opportunities launched during the boom years of Arts Council England funding. She worries that with funding getting harder to come by, similar breaks could become scarcer for young directors, writers and actors.

“I think we have a responsibilty to make sure those opportunities don’t tail off,” she stresses.

In practical terms, this will mean continuing the Donmar’s RAD scheme and the linked season of work the company presents at the Trafalgar Studios to promote the work of RAD scheme graduates. Then, from the summer of 2013 the Donmar will open a rehearsal and education space in Dryden Street in another converted warehouse, which will also house offices for the Donmar’s 17 staff.The pair also have plans for a major expansion of the Donmar’s digital brand - something similar to what Rourke undertook at the Bush with Bushgreen - but they are still be a little cagey about the precise details.

“I think in terms of digital, we’re looking at a whole range of thrilling stuff and the whole idea of how the Donmar brand, which has not been particularly digital, might somehow become this presence,” says Rourke. “Sometime we feel worried about talking about theatres as brands, but it is [a brand]. There is that huge level of awareness about it and we are asking how we can make it open and available to more people in different ways - I think that is one of the questions that is central to our leadership of the organisation.”

That idea of expansion beyond the Donmar’s 250-seat home is a recurring theme of our conversation. Pakenham has prior experience of transatlantic partnerships - both on the 24 Hour Plays and the Old Vic’s Bridge Project - and she is clearly keen to further exploit the Donmar’s reputation on Broadway, a key achievement of Grandage’s tenure.

“It’s’s a brand beyond the UK - it’s a brand in New York. Michael and James [Bierman, former executive producer] did a huge amount of work to ensure those transfers really were Donmar productions. So the Donmar has real resonance over there. And it’s very energising for British artists to go to New York. It’s an energising city and there’s such respect for British theatre over there and actors in particular.”

They also have tentative plans to repeat the success of Grandage’s Donmar West End initiative, through which the company took up residence at the Wyndham’s Theatre, opening up Donmar productions to much bigger audiences, but still keeping ticket prices affordable.

“It’s certainly one of the things we’re talking about - it was such a huge success,” says Pakenham. “Whether you do something exactly the same way I don’t know. It was so brilliant and unique that it’s always hard to repeat the same formula.

“But, linked to Josie and me wanting the Donmar to reach out to more people, beyond its very magical space (which you want to preserve and take care of first and foremost) I’m sure we’ll be doing a lot of reaching out in the way the West End season did.”

“The spirit of that season is absolutely something we’d be keen to repeat,” adds Rourke. “But whether we did it in exactly the same way needs some discussion.”

In the meantime, of course, Rourke has the small matter of her inaugural season to look after. Announced at the end of last year it is a brave mix of a Restoration comedy, a revival of a Bush hit from the 1990s and a new translation of a European classic. The season opens with Rourke herself directing Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (“big skirts, tight breeches, book now to avoid disappointment” she jokes), followed by Robert Holman’s trilogy of plays - Making Noise Quietly - which will be directed by one of Rourke’s “great influences” Peter Gill. The season ends with Rourke again at the helm, directing Jack Thorne’s new translation of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s The Physicists (“a play that asks essential questions about the human condition”).

It’s not what you’d term a safe season - especially when one considers that, in Grandage, Rourke is following in the footsteps of one the most critically acclaimed directors of recent years. But she seems genuinely unfazed, insisting she isn’t worried about audiences and critics comparing her to her predecessor.

“If you take that attitude then you’re not going to be doing what you should be doing which is reaching out, embracing an audience,” she says. “If you’re worrying about whether they like you, that’s not a way to run a theatre. It’s to open your doors and do the best work you possibly can and really look forward to seeing them.”

• The Recruiting Officer opens on February 14, following previews from February 9