“Her predecessors at the Donmar, Michael Grandage and Sam Mendes, had turned the 251-seat venue in Covent Garden into an international player, through movie-star casting and regular West End and Broadway transfers. Although thrilled to be the first woman to run a central London theatre, Rourke knew the risk of becoming a theatrical equivalent of John Major after Margaret Thatcher or Gordon Brown after Tony Blair. After a nervous start, she made the theatre her own with a programme that forefronted women – notably Phyllida Lloyd’s magnificent trilogy imagining Shakespeare tragedies as performed by female prisoners – and politics.”