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Josie Rourke and Kate Pakenham to Depart London’s Donmar Warehouse
LONDON — The Donmar Warehouse here announced the coming departure of Josie Rourke and Kate Pakenham, two prominent figures in British theater who ran the playhouse.
Ms. Rourke will step down in 2019, after eight years as the Donmar’s artistic director, and Ms. Pakenham, the executive producer, will leave this June. The pair made up the first female partnership to lead a London playhouse.
“I was proud to be the first woman director to run a major London theater, but I’m even prouder that the landscape has now changed beyond recognition, and forever,” Ms. Rourke said in a statement.
During their tenure, the pair promoted the work of female actors and directors. In 2012, they worked with the director Phyllida Lloyd to produce an all-female Shakespeare trilogy starring Harriet Walter. “The impact of Phyllida’s all-female Shakespeare Trilogy in promoting the value of women’s and diverse voices on our stages has been particularly energizing,” Ms. Pakenham said in a statement.
The Donmar also became known for regularly featuring political works. In 2014, Ms. Rourke directed a short run of James Graham’s “Privacy,” a genre-bending play about government surveillance and cyber security. Mr. Graham, a leading British playwright, also collaborated with the theater in 2015 on “The Vote,” which starred Judi Dench and was broadcast live on television here in Britain on the night of the general election that year.
In 2017, the theater staged Steve Waters’s “Limehouse,” a dramatization of the 1981 formation of the now defunct Social Democratic Party.
A number of productions from the Donmar transferred to New York: “Privacy” debuted at the Public Theater in 2016, Ms. Lloyd’s Shakespeare trilogy was shown as St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2017 and a production of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” directed by Ms. Rourke ran on Broadway in 2017.
Other notable productions at the Donmar included the Olivier-award-winning “City of Angels,” a production of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” featuring Tom Hiddleston, and Kevin Elyot’s “My Night With Reg,” which transferred to the West End.
Ms. Rourke is working on her first feature film, “Mary Queen of Scots,” which will feature the Golden Globe winner Saoirse Ronan and is set for release in the United States in November. Her final show as the Donmar’s artistic director will be in 2019.
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