David Cumming

David Cumming is a British writer, actor, and co-composer born on 16 January 1987 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. His mother was born in Scotland and his father was a Pakistani immigrant. Cumming studied Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick. He identifies as queer.

In 2012, Cumming co-founded the comedy collective Kill the Beast alongside Natasha Hodgson, Zoë Roberts, Ollie Jones, and Clem Garritty. The group produced four stage shows: The Boy Who Kicked Pigs (2013), He Had Hairy Hands (2014), Don't Wake The Damp (2016), and Director's Cut (2019). In 2017, Cumming, Hodgson, and Roberts departed Kill the Beast and formed a new company, SpitLip, joined by Felix Hagan, with the stated aim of creating large-scale musicals.

SpitLip's debut musical, Operation Mincemeat, became the defining project of Cumming's career. He served as co-writer, co-composer, and originating cast member, playing the role of Charles Cholmondeley and Others in every production of the show. The musical won the 2024 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical, and Cumming received a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Actor in a Musical for his performance. Operation Mincemeat subsequently transferred to Broadway, where it was running in 2025. Cumming received three Tony Award nominations for his work on the production: Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, and Best Original Score. Notably, one week before the show's opening at Riverside Studios, Cumming broke his collarbone in a biking accident, requiring his replacement, Seán Carey, to learn the full musical in a single week.

In 2018, Cumming co-directed Frankenstein: How to Make a Monster alongside Conrad Murray, developed in collaboration with Battersea Arts Centre's Beatbox Academy. The production was later adapted for television by BBC Four. That same year, Cumming joined the drag performance group Sink the Pink for How to Catch a Krampus, returning in 2019 for Escape From Trash Planet. In 2021, Cumming and Sink the Pink collaborator Ginger Johnson co-wrote and co-directed Dog Show, a canine-themed queer cabaret that ran for a month at the Pleasance.

In 2023, Cumming served as Guest Artistic Director at the King's Head Theatre, where he presented the festival QUEER FUTURES: A FESTIVAL OF THE NOW WHICH IS YET TO COME. He returned to the King's Head in 2024 as a cast member of Outings, an anthology of coming out stories staged as a fundraiser for the LGBTQ+ Switchboard charity.