LONDON — Anyone hoping to see David Tennant on the Almeida stage has a long wait ahead. The theatre said on Thursday that he will play Archie Rice in John Osborne’s The Entertainer, but not until early 2028, the last dated production in the first season programmed by its new artistic director, Dominic Cooke.
The box office moves much sooner. Tickets for the first two productions, Caryl Churchill’s Three and a Bit and Alexander Zeldin’s Inequalities trilogy, go on sale to patrons and Gold and Friends Plus members at noon on Tuesday, October 20, to Almeida Friends on October 22 and to the general public on October 27. The other dated productions carry only the line “Tickets on sale in 2027.”
Cooke said the season “explores ideas around a world in crisis,” and the Almeida’s own descriptions bear that out. Chris Bush’s The Right Woman follows the race to elect Labour’s first female prime minister and lets the audience pick one of three endings at the interval. The theatre sets The Entertainer against a “collapsing world order, conflict in the Eastern Mediterranean and a British identity crisis.”
The Almeida Theatre announced eight productions running from January 2027 into early 2028, counting Zeldin’s three plays as one trilogy. Churchill’s Three and a Bit, directed by James Macdonald, runs from January 14 to March 13. The Inequalities, which stages Beyond Caring, LOVE and Faith, Hope and Charity together for the first time, follows from March 22 to May 22. Cooke directs Jamie Bogyo’s Musculus in June and July, his first production in the job, then comes The Right Woman in August and September, Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona’s The Island in October and November, and Terence Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy from December 2027 to January 2028. Hammaad Chaudry’s Dinner in Leith, the first of a series of site-specific shows called Almeida Out There, has no dates yet.
Cooke ran the Royal Court from 2007 to 2013 and was named in June 2025, the Almeida said, to succeed Rupert Goold. He describes the new programme as bringing together “four world premieres, ambitious revivals and a landmark co-production.”
The announcement leaves gaps. It labels three productions as world premieres, Three and a Bit, Musculus and The Right Woman, against Cooke’s four, and Tennant is the only cast member named anywhere in the programme. The Inequalities page credits a co-production with A Zeldin Company, in association with Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Athens Epidaurus Festival, but nothing in the announcement says whether that is the “landmark co-production” Cooke has in mind.
