Homeland star Damian Lewis inherits Olivier’s Henry V to open Rupert Goold’s Old Vic era

Every new artistic director announces a season, but the first one is also a manifesto: a reading list that tells you how the person in charge means to speak to the building. Rupert Goold, who spent more than a decade turning the Almeida into the house that sent Ink and King Charles III to the West End and Broadway, has chosen to open his Old Vic tenure with the most loaded text available to him. Henry V, with Homeland and Band of Brothers star Damian Lewis as the warrior-king, will be the first thing audiences see of the new regime.

The choice is a conversation with ghosts. Laurence Olivier played the role on this same stage before the war, and that performance became the figure cast in the statuette of the awards that now carry his name. Goold calls his staging provocative, and the theatre’s own copy promises a production that challenges what makes a leader a legend, a question Shakespeare’s play, with its charismatic king talking exhausted men into the breach, has never stopped asking. It is also Lewis’s Old Vic debut.

Rupert Goold standing on the Old Vic stage in front of the empty auditorium — Rupert Goold, Artistic Director of the Old Vic. Photo: Jonny Ruff / Old Vic

The rest of the programme reads like Goold’s own description of the theatre: classical repertoire, European work and musical revivals. Milly Alcock, of Supergirl and House of the Dragon, takes the title role in Julie, Rebecca Frecknall’s contemporary version of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, first staged by Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. Frecknall, whose Cabaret and A Streetcar Named Desire both won Olivier Awards, makes it her first production as the Old Vic’s associate director; the house has not staged Miss Julie since Maggie Smith played her in 1966.

Goold then directs Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s Assassins, the Tony-winning musical about the misfits who tried to kill American presidents, never before seen at the Old Vic. Arinzé Kene, reunited with director Omar Elerian after their Olivier-nominated Misty, closes the season alone onstage in Kohlhaas, Marco Baliani and Remo Rostagno’s adaptation of Kleist’s novella about a horse dealer whose demand for justice turns violent, first produced by Brighton Festival.

Milly Alcock in a red-lit portrait for Julie at the Old Vic — Milly Alcock for Julie. Photo: Nadav Kander / Old Vic

In the announcement, Goold calls the Old Vic an innately maverick playhouse, one that has always sat between the subsidised and commercial sectors, and credits the work of his predecessor, Matthew Warchus, before hoping the new era can marry tradition and contemporary daring. The structural moves back the rhetoric up: an ongoing partnership with ITA to co-produce work and exchange artists, a first season in the Greene Studio for three emerging directors, Sara Aniqah Malik, Yasmin Hafesji and Roberta Zuric, and a scheme called Old Vic New Rush that offers under-30s front-row seats at £20 for the first five previews of every main-house show.

Henry V runs from 26 January to 27 March 2027, with press night on 9 February. Julie follows from 10 April to 29 May, Assassins from 15 June to 21 August and Kohlhaas from 27 August to 4 September. Tickets and Rush sign-up are through the Old Vic’s own website.

For the director who staged Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III, a play that put a living monarch into blank verse, opening with Shakespeare’s most persuasive king is less a safe bet than an opening argument.

Tags: Milly Alcock, Damian Lewis, Stephen Sondheim, Arinzé Kene, Henry V, Old Vic