Dominic Cooke: a life in theatre

George Devine, the founder of London's Royal Court theatre, had some words of aeronautical wisdom for anyone foolhardy enough to follow him as artistic director. "I can promise my successor adventurous flying," he proclaimed during his resignation speech in 1965. "Plenty of bumps, many anxious glances at the fuel gauge, most of the time in thick stormy cloud." But the job offered a sliver of something brighter and, he concluded, something unique: "occasional, very occasional, glimpses of the nearest thing to paradise".

In the many years since Devine spoke those words, the Royal Court has weathered plenty of turbulence, but for the moment the theatre seems to have found, if not quite paradise, at least an earthly equivalent. Last year began with not one but two consecutive transfers to the West End – for the first time since 1968 – and ended with the news that the theatre's production of Jez Butterworth's play Jerusalem was on its way to Broadway (where it will open in April). After winning big at the 2010 Oliviers, the Royal Court was crowned London theatre of the year by the Stage newspaper. No doubt it's tempting fate to say it currently seems invincible, but in two categories of last November's Evening Standard awards the theatre supplied every single name on the shortlist.

The current artistic director, Dominic Cooke, looks anxious when I reel off this litany of success. "Very scary," he smiles warily, no doubt with Devine's words somewhere in mind. "I'm pessimistic by nature, so I'm always thinking that around the corner there's a disaster looming." Then he looks worried that he's giving the wrong impression. "It's not that I don't enjoy how it's going for us at the moment."

We are sitting in his spartan office overlooking Sloane Square. When Cooke moved in, five years ago, the walls were lined with photographs of the theatre's founding fathers. Cooke immediately took most of them down ("I found it really intimidating"), but has gradually replaced them with modest trophies of his own. In front of his desk sits a scale model of the animal that barged its way onstage during his rampageous 2007 production of Ionesco's Rhinoceros; next to it is a memento from Jerusalem.

Jerusalem in particular has become the emblem of everything the Royal Court has got right under Cooke – even if, as he's quick to point out, it was coaxed into life by his predecessor, Ian Rickson. The play starred Mark Rylance as Johnny "Rooster" Byron, a beer-gurgling, barnstorming braggart who lives in a caravan deep in the Wiltshire woods, harried on one side by council officials desperate to evict him, on the other by teenagers wanting drugs. Rylance's acting was acclaimed as the performance of a lifetime, but the play seized the public imagination, I venture, because it offered something far deeper: an essay on the muddled, muddied state of Englishness.

Cooke agrees. "Jerusalem is a fantastic play, and it was a brilliant production, but the reason people queued around the block – literally around the block – was because it was talking about something happening here and now. These are frightening, confusing times. There's a desire for stories that address where we are."

As Royal Court manifestos go, this isn't a bad effort – if not, perhaps, up to the oratorical standards of Devine, whose opening salvo in March 1956 made the Times editorial page. In words that still haunt British drama, he declared: "Ours is not to be a producer's theatre, nor an actor's theatre . . . but a writer's theatre." The Court put out a call for new scripts – and received nearly 700 that were unproduceable. Devine was approaching despair when – in an episode that has become one of the theatre's founding myths – he stumbled across John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, a fiercely unsentimental representation of those who had supposedly never had it so good. By May 1956 it was on stage, a few weeks later it was a hit, and the Court had arrived. In the decades since, the theatre has been at the leading edge of British text-based drama: the black-box studio theatre of the 70s, the political satires of the 80s, the in-yer-face revolutions of the 90s.

However, history has sometimes weighed heavy (not for nothing did a literary manager note that "the Court . . . has never actually been what it used to be"). Cooke knows this better than most, having dared to take issue with what was perceived as an article of faith, the requirement that Royal Court productions be set around a working-class kitchen sink. At his very first press conference, he issued notice that his regime would not be solely – as he memorably put it in an interview – "a place for naturalist plays set in the north of England that involved unspeakable sexual acts". Cue cries of horror (though not many, it is safe to say, from around working-class kitchen sinks).

Yet even his critics admit that Cooke's refocusing of the theatre has paid off. The business end has been sharpened, helped partly by those commercial transfers. Its international profile has expanded, and a new generation has graduated from the Young Writers' Programme to the theatre proper – notably an array of talented female playwrights, still scandalously under-represented on British stages. Not everything has worked: Cooke's attempt in 2008 to bring a musical, Wig Out!, to SW1 was condemned by one critic as "strained and anorexic". But perhaps that's the point. With as many as 22 productions on stage each year, the Court – as Devine once argued – has an inalienable right to fail.

Mostly, too, Cooke has succeeded, particularly in producing plays that anatomise the state of the nation without standing on a soapbox. His 2007 double revival of Rhinoceros and Max Frisch's Arsonists poked absurdist fun at our fears about terrorism and civil disobedience. Polly Stenham's brilliantly dangerous first two scripts, That Face (2007) and Tusk Tusk (2009), sliced into the tensions of 21st-century family life. Lucy Prebble's Enron (2009), although focused on the Texan energy giant, became the defining theatrical representation of the credit crunch – backlit by the glare of panicking computer screens, the stage filled with ravening monsters. Laura Wade's Posh, timed to open as the Tories edged into power in May 2010, reminded us just what we were in for: overprivileged hooligans in drinking-society blazers who trash a pub as thoughtlessly as they will trash the country.

Cooke's own work as a director has been similarly confrontational. The first play he put on at the Court, Bruce Norris's The Pain and the Itch, took the battle straight to the chattering classes in its satirical depiction of a dinner party that turns into a warzone. His production of Norris's new play, Clybourne Park, which opened last night in the West End, goes, if anything, even further. Although ostensibly about racism, it exposes with laser-sharp comedy the hypocrisy underpinning many British middle-class lives. "There was a feeling that it was specifically about race in America, and that it wouldn't really speak to people in London," Cooke says. "But I don't think it's really about that: it's about white liberals. It talks about race in terms of property; the real story is who owns what."

The first act of Clybourne Park takes place in 1959, as a well-to-do white couple prepares to offload their house for a bargain-basement price – to the horror of the neighbours, who fret about what kind of family (which is to say, of what skin colour) will buy it. The second act is set in the same house, 50 years on, as another well-to-do white couple are preparing to move in to what is now a black neighbourhood. They meet the residents' committee, and the play becomes a glittering display cabinet of middle-class pieties and liberal doublethink.

Anyone who's fantasised about the betting shop on the corner being transformed into an organic grocery should see it, I suggest. Cooke laughs. "Bruce is so accurate about self-delusion, particularly among wealthy liberals. They see themselves as the solution, whereas actually they're part of the problem. To the people who don't own anything, they're exactly the same as the conservatives." He smiles wickedly. "Of course, many people who go to the theatre are of that persuasion."

Cooke was born in 1966 to a father who was a film editor and a mother who wanted to be an actor, but eventually became a medical receptionist ("she got a place at Rada, but her father told her she wasn't allowed to go. Not respectable enough"). They split up when Cooke was four; his mother remarried, then separated from her new husband. He and his sisters lived peripatetically, eventually settling in Swiss Cottage, Hampstead's scruffier neighbour. Class conflict was something Cooke was aware of, even as a child. "My mum was an NHS receptionist, and I was at a working-class comprehensive, but my dad was in the movie business. It was quite a . . ." He halts, unusually at a loss for words. "Well, I was exposed to different ways of living quite early on: class differences, financial differences."

It wasn't until Cooke arrived at Warwick University in 1985 that he began to understand theatre's capacity to be both a political and a moral force. Fittingly enough, it was the Royal Court that seized his attention. "We did this brilliant course, which was basically all about the Court – about the shift from TS Eliot's The Cocktail Party to Look Back in Anger, right through Wesker, Bond, all those writers. Plays that really engaged, which were asking questions."

One of Cooke's introductions to contemporary drama was the work of Caryl Churchill, whose Serious Money (1987) and Top Girls (1982) were produced at the Court when it was run by Max Stafford-Clark. Cooke cites the formative influence of Cloud Nine, Churchill's adventurous play about sexuality and society brought to the theatre in 1979. (Two decades later, Cooke's championing of Churchill resulted in one of the most controversial episodes of his tenure at the Court, when the BBC refused to broadcast her short play Seven Jewish Children after complaints it was antisemitic; the Guardian later put a film version on its website.)

It was at university, too, that Cooke discovered another abiding love – Shakespeare. He saw Deborah Warner's groundbreaking, gruesome production of Titus Andronicus in Stratford in 1987, and was hooked. "It was unlike anything else," he remembers. "The aesthetic was very raw and theatrical, and it felt like they'd explored every corner of the play. There was such an inquiring and provocative spirit to it."

Cooke worked as a TV runner after graduating, but soon decided theatre was where he wanted to focus his energies. The company he set up out of university prospered, and the Royal Shakespeare Company took him on as an assistant director. This was a godsend, he says now. "I'd been running my own company, paying 10 actors, doing VAT returns. It was a massive responsibility in my early 20s. And it didn't allow me to learn. I was delighted just to be paid at last, as well as to be given the chance to work with all these amazing actors and directors. I had to go into Antony Sher's dressing room and give him notes, which at 26 was incredibly daunting, but it built my confidence."

Cooke became confident enough, at any rate, to write to Stephen Daldry, who had taken over from Stafford-Clark at the Royal Court. He was invited to join Court script meetings. Then, a year later, in 1996, he was brought in as an associate director. Cooke stayed for another three years before being lured back to – where else? – the RSC, where he sponsored such successful new writing as Debbie Tucker Green's play about sex tourism, Trade. He also directed some impressive revivals: promenade, high-concept interpretations of A Winter's Tale and Pericles, and an incisive period version of The Crucible with Iain Glen (all 2006). Does he have a signature style, I ask. He is aghast: "Once you start becoming aware of yourself as a brand, you're sunk. For me, the thing is responding to the play, finding its language."

Being willing to listen is essential back at the Royal Court, he argues. "It's crucial not to have an orthodoxy about playwriting, but to say to writers: 'We want you to break new ground, we want you to write what is true to you, in the way that is true to you.' That's the most crucial part of my job." Despite authoring several adaptations, however – including a version of Arabian Nights for the Young Vic in 1998 – he harbours few ambitions to be a writer himself. "I've never felt confident enough. Some writers are good directors, but to have the initial idea, and the confidence to keep going . . . " He pulls a face.

He is guarded when it comes to discussing where he might head next. Does he fancy running the National? Might he return to the RSC? "I'm so tied up with this place that I can't really think about it," he says, with a touch of impatience. "There are things I've thought of doing." Such as? "Like directing a film – maybe, maybe – and there are plays I'd like to do. But I don't have a sense that I'm going to do this or that." He laughs. "Maybe I'll be a landscape gardener."

He has lived with his partner, the actor and writer Alexi Kaye Campbell, for 13 years. "Suburban," he says, relishing the word. "I don't have much time for anything other than work. I'm 45. Maybe if I was 25, I would have energy for other things, but when I'm not here I tend to live a quiet life."

Some people, I say, might be surprised that a man who has achieved so much seems so – well, normal. I think of the rhinoceros by his desk. What's lurking under the armour? "Every creative person is insecure," he responds. "I've never met someone who is creative who doesn't have doubts. If you don't have any self-doubt, you never move forward. You can't be self-satisfied and do good work." He smiles. "What I'm trying to say is that it's crucial not to believe your own press."