The award winning Theatre Director Sally Cookson trained at LAMDA and worked as an actor for ten years before embarking on a freelance directing career. She has worked on productions for theatres including the Old Vic London, the Bristol Old Vic, the National Theatre, the Duke of York’s and the Rose Theatre Kingston.  Most recently Sally has directed Dracula: Mina’s Reckoning for National Theatre of Scotland, Birthmarked for Edinburgh Festival and Wonderboy for Bristol Old Vic.

She received an Olivier Award for A Monster Calls (Old Vic London) winning best family and entertainment in 2019, and three Olivier nominations for Peter Pan (National Theatre/Bristol Old Vic), Hetty Feather (Kenny Wax Productions), Cinderella a Fairytale (The Other Palace). Her productions of Jane Eyre and Peter Pan have been made into National Theatre Live films.

Sally Cookson’s latest project, along with writer Mike Akers, is the staging of an epic community production of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield at the Theatre Royal Bath. This production is the result of a year-long project from a professional creative team who have worked with a cast of more than 100 Community actors to bring Dickens’ masterful mix of poignancy and humour to life.

StageTalk talked with Sally about directing David Copperfield: A Life

Power to the People

Sally Cookson has designs on your imagination and she has assembled the troops for the coming assault. The long casting process for this production of Dickens’ own favourite novel arose from the fact that the prospect of working at such a prestigious theatre as Bath’s Theatre Royal (and with a director of some renown) would have seemed a daunting prospect to some people who might otherwise have liked to take part. With that in mind casting took the form of ‘taster’ workshops in surroundings that would have been more comfortable and familiar to people unused to the rigours of theatre: school halls, community hubs, church halls and the like and with the clear understanding that no previous experience was necessary. Nor for that matter was any burning or thwarted ambition to be on the stage a requirement – though neither was it a barrier.

Whilst she was always aware that you cannot have such a story without leading characters, indeed some of the most memorable in English literature; David obviously, Pegotty, Steerforth, Micawber and so on, not forgetting Uriah Heep, one of the most odious characters in English literature, the emphasis was always going to be on the ensemble rather that the individual. Cookson agreed that, ‘the production was a celebration of community’. She encouraged the actors to look out for each other and ‘Care for others in the room’.

Sally Cookson’s work has, I suggested, consistently tended towards the epic. ‘Perhaps as a way of exploring how small cogs fit into the wider schemes of the world’, she agreed. Even a play such as A Monster Calls which is about things internal, preparing for grief, truth and resilience and so on, is spread out onto a wider canvas using the tools of imagination and the resources of theatre. The idea of resilience is a theme that is explored again in David Copperfield.

In keeping with the importance that Cookson gives to the ensemble, during rehearsal a lot of time was devoted to considering the themes of the story that they were about to tell on the stage. The agreement amongst the cast was that his foundational upbringing in love, prior to the death of his mother, gives David the resilience to meet and overcome the trials of his subsequent life when it had been turned upside down with the arrival of Mr Murdstone. For this company of actors the play is in part about David’s journey to find his ‘community’ his ‘family’, after the rupture to his comfortable certainties.

Owing to the commitments of the members of the company, the daily lives of home and work, rehearsals have been going on for a year. I wondered if she found it frustrating when people have to fit in rehearsals around their full-time lives. There was, she considered, no lack of commitment from the cast. The lack of instant, ‘getting on with your fellow actors’, which forms part of the training of professionals and is one aspect of their stock-in-trade might have led to awkwardness had not Cookson come up with a clever way around this potential rub. Mindful of the fact that food and eating together are great social lubricants, a picnic lunch was organised early on in the process, during which folk could get to know each other. The aim was to have an inclusive company from across Bath and its hinterland, supported with a guiding principle of ‘What we can achieve together’. In this respect we should mention that the production benefits from a bequest by the Bath actress, Margot Boyd, who some may remember as Mrs Antrobus in the Archers. The bequest stipulates a sum of money to be used for community projects, hence the possibility of such an ambitious undertaking.

Working with Associate Director and Access Director, Sophie Cottle and her script writer, Mike Akers (whose previous collaborations have taken Jane Eyre and Peter Pan to the National Theatre) Sally Cookson, with her highly imaginative stripped-down style, always encouraging the audience’s imagination to engage with the play, made playfulness during rehearsal a key to the heart of the ensemble.

Sally Cookson seems to have an instinctive grasp of what an audience will follow, what she can get away with by way of tickling the trout of the collective imagination. It’s a kind of unspoken pact in which she seems to suggest ’You don’t need vast stage machinery and exotic set dressing, just give me your imagination and trust and we can tell this story together’. In her production of Jane Eyre, for example, the moment when Jane arrives at Lowood and throws open the windows is a moment of dramatic revelation that still lingers in the memory. How the one hundred plus cast responded to her bold recipe is a pudding whose proof we all await with great expectation.

© Interview by Graham Wyles

DAVID COPPERFIELD: A LIFE appears at the Theatre Royal Bath from Friday 20 to Sunday 22 February 2026.

A Charity Gala performance will also take place on Saturday 21 February at 7pm in support of Venue 4, the new Community theatre space being created in the heart of Theatre Royal Bath. Ticket holders for this black-tie event can enjoy a red-carpet welcome with guest announcer and VIP treatment.

Photography credits: Manuel Harlan, Helena M Photography.