When Lorne Campbell was
appointed artistic director of Northern Stage, Newcastle's most
adventurous theatre producing house, he arrived at a tumultuous time.
One of the theatre's main funders, Newcastle Council, had begun
consultations to deal with a proposed 100 per cent cut in its arts
budget. This came after two rounds of cuts by Arts Council England,
Northern Stage's other chief funder, in the midst of swinging cuts
from the UK government in an attempt to stave off the recession
caused primarily by themselves in cahoots with the banks.
Several months on, and
Newcastle Council has upped its contribution to Northern Stage by
fifty per cent, and, if the theatre's Edinburgh programme of some
eighteen shows that form the theatre's ambitious Northern Stage at St
Stephens is anything to go by, as with many artists reimagining
creative possibilities during lean times, the theatre is in the midst
of an artistic revolution.
“There's an awful lot
here that reminds me of Scotland after the millennium,” Campbell
says of Newcastle and the north-east of England's theatre scene. “The
scene was really waking up to themselves then, and artists were
realising that it wasn’t about being parochial, but was about being
excellent and ambitious, and that they could produce work that was
world class. Newcastle and the north-east could be about to hit a
critical mass like that in a very similar way. There's a whole range
of really interesting artists who are either on the cusp of breaking
through, or who could easily go on to the next level, and there's a
huge level of ambition here.”
Campbell's appointment
at Northern Stage sees the thirty-five year old Edinburgh-born
director come full circle in his career. Campbell's first
professional job was at Northern Stage, where he assisted on various
productions. It was as associate director at the Traverse in
Edinburgh where he really started to come into his own on acclaimed
productions including Alan Wilkins' Carthage must Be Destroyed and
Morna Pearson's astonishing debut play, Distracted. Both works won
awards.
It was while at the
Traverse that Campbell began to explore different ways of working via
the cross-disciplinary programme, Cubed. After leaving the Traverse,
Campbell directed several Scottish plays in Bath before co-founding
Greyscale, a collective of actors, writers, directors and designers
including fellow director Selma Dimitrijevic, actor Sandy Grierson
and internationally renowned Leo Warner and Mark Grimmer's
internationally renowned video design company, 59 Productions.
It was with Greyscale
that Campbell and his fellow travellers developed a way of working
which seemed to tap into the anarchic spirit of fringe theatre's
loose-knit alternative and anarchic roots, while reinventing it for
the twenty-first century on a par with a new generation of
boundary-hopping theatre-makers.
Greyscale were, and
remain a part of Northern Stage's forward-thinking development
programme, and, while the responsibilities of running a building are
different, some of Greyscale's spirit is clearly evident in Northern
Stage at St Stephens. Artists involved include Daniel Bye with his
latest solo piece, The Paper Birds and Third Angel, all of whom will
be taking radical looks at the world in radical ways.
“There's an
interesting line running through the whole programme that's about
dissent,” Campbell observes, “and what it means to dissent. It's
all relevant, timely stuff.
While by no means
intentional, the centrepiece of Northern Stage's Edinburgh programme
looks set to be The Bloody Great Border Ballad Project. This will b e
a late night show in which artists from Scotland, England and
elsewhere will imagine the next ninety-five years following the
imagined (or not) dissolution of the 1707 Act of Union via an ever
growing ballad that will add a new verse each night.
“One of things it
came out of,” says Campbell, “is that, coming from Scotland and
working in Newcastle, I was both on the inside and the outside of
this wonderful community of northern artists, who were starting to
realise that they were a community. I thought it was weird that no
Scottish artists existed as part of this community, even though they
were asking the same sort of questions.
“Much of the reason
for that was to do with this weird artificial line that was largely
to do with the different funding streams that exist in England and
Scotland. So we said, let's talk about independence, and let's start
to imagine what a ballad for independence might be like. Each
balladeer takes responsibility for the next five years, so by the end
you have ninety-five years of imagined future history.”
Balladeers signed up so
far include Cora Bissett and Kieran Hurley from Scotland, and, from
England, Chris Thorpe, Lucy EllinsonEllinson, Daniel Bye and Alex
Kelly.
“I'm really
interested in what a folk tale us in that context, “ says Campbell,
“and it's going to be something somewhere between a gig, a ceilidh
and a political meeting. It's the most ambitious thing I've ever
done,” Campbell says with relish, “but it also has the least
amount of rehearsal time I've ever had, but there should hopefully be
something very immediate about it because of that. It's big voices,
big ideas and big politics with no sense of irony, talking about
things that matter. I hope the ghosts of Joan Littlewood, John
McGrath and Ken Campbell look down on it from above and approve of
every moment. It's going to be a riot.”
Northern Stage at St
Stephens, St Stephens Street until August 25th.
The Herald, August 20th 2013
ends
Comments