Skip to main content

National Theatre of Scotland 2013 Season - Vicky Featherstone's Swan-Song

That there is no main-stage swan-song directed by National Theatre of 
Scotland artistic director Vicky Featherstone in her final season 
before departing to run the Royal Court speaks volumes about her tenure 
over the last six years. Because it isn't any single production which 
has defined  Featherstone's role. Rather, it is an all-embracing vision 
which has enabled artists to be bold and to think big while 
Featherstone has taken on a more diplomatic role protective of her 
charges. Indeed, it could be argued that Featherstone's own creative 
work has been neglected because of this.

Of the season itself, if there is an element of baton-passing, with 
associate director Graham McLaren being particularly prolific, there is 
also a sense that theatre in Scotland has become increasingly 
exploratory. If the NTS has the resources to raise the bar, then the 
talent is already there to take advantage of it. It is an attitude the 
ongoing national embarrassment that is Creative Scotland could learn 
much from.

Yes, there are classic plays, but they are not there to appease 
traditionalists, but to breathe fresh life into already great works. 
But it is the season's collaborations, with Oran Mor, Vox Motus and The 
Arches, that point the way. All of these companies have led from the 
ground up, and their presence in the programme is vindication for the 
importance of the license to experiment beyond box-ticking.

Featherstone's final NTS season, then, is both as a summation of her 
achievements and a serious pointer towards the organisation's future. 
Whoever replaces Featherstone as artistic director, it remains crucial 
that the NTS is not squeezed into some parochialist ghetto dictated by 
its political funders. That would be a backward step, and a major 
mistake. For the organisation to flourish, the NTS must remain as 
expansively internationalist as its 2013 season promises to be.


The Herald, September 28th 2012

ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more