Has worked in TIE and educational theatre and drama since 1988 as an actor, director and playwright. He was  the Artistic Director of the internationally acclaimed Big  Brum Theatre in Education Company for 17 years  (1999-2015) where he directed 38 new TIE programmes;  including 9 World Premiere productions of new plays by  the great British playwright Edward Bond. Since 2009 Cooper has been working with Drama Rainbow. The work with Drama Rainbow includes the training of teachers in  drama education and the development of theatre  education. He has also created picture books illustrated by Ceri Townsend as part of a Creative Curriculum the Company offers for children aged 3-8yrs in kindergartens and arts centres. He is a frequent visitor to China  working extensively in the field of drama and theatre  education in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Nanjing,  Guangzhou and other cities. Cooper has also been an associate artist with TEFO in Hong Kong since 2018 and  directed a new site-specific TiE programme, Splintered,  based on his play of the same name in partnership with  the Red Cross. 

In 2008 Cooper set up Accident Time Productions which  works mostly in Europe on theatre productions and  projects, teaching, training, lecturing and presenting  workshops, including ongoing long-term collaborations  in Hungary, Slovenia, Malta, Greece, Norway and Ireland.  In January 2017, he also became a founder member and the International Director of JianXue (See & Learn), which is a research and development NGO in the field of educational drama and theatre. Since 1996, Cooper has been the author of 44 plays. In 2019  as well as  Splintered, he adapted  R L Stevenson's great novella,  The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and wrote  Minotaur for Big Brum; The Journey for Drama Rainbow  Youth Theatre; The Silence, for Birmingham's The GAP  Arts, about the marginalisation of the Irish and Muslim  communities in the city, a new version of the traditional  fairy tale of Jack & the Beanstalk for Drama Rainbow's  TiE Company and his Frankenstein was performed by  MikrosNotos Theatre Company in Athens. In 2020 there  will be 4 new community, youth theatre and TiE  productions of his plays: Youth Theatre productions of  Field of Stones and The Soil  for Drama Rainbow, Beijing; a TiE production of a his latest monodrama Socially  Distant, a new about the Covid lockdown and isolation  for Big BrumTiE, and Cooper will perform his Community production of Bunkered at the GAP Basement Theatre,  for JianXue in November.