Eastgate pointed in the right direction

Published on Sunday 19 December 2004 00:23

THE Eastgate theatre and arts centre is straight out of a children’s picture book. This converted church in Peebles sits next door to a butcher’s, a baker’s, a tailor’s and a sweet shop. To the rear is a mountain looking exactly as mountains should: gently rounded and covered in trees.

The heroine of our picture book is Mary Shields. Her story begins earlier this year when she said goodbye to Edinburgh, where she had worked at the Assembly Rooms for 17 years and moved to the Borders to become the director of an arts centre that the people of Peebles had been dreaming of for eight years. It changed her life. But much as she loves the change of pace, there’s been nothing laid back about her programming of the Eastgate.

Old habits die hard and, having got used to filling every available slot in the Assembly Rooms, she’s found it hard not to supply Peebles with back-to-back culture all year round. "I thought it would be gentle, quiet and lady-like, but it’s completely frantic," she says. "October was just insane - we had so much going on. I’ve got to learn how to rein in and not over-programme, but there’s so much on offer that suits this size of venue."

Her policy in this first year has been to schedule as wide a range of events as possible in order to figure out the tastes of her audience. The response has been a surprise: they like it all. "So far the whole year has been consistent," she says. "There’s a definite inquisitiveness about what’s going on. The audience has been waiting for this for a long time and is willing to put trust in the people putting the programme together."

Performances in January include a Fringe First winning play about Orson Welles, jazz with Tam White, children’s entertainment with the Happy Gang, a group of Tuvan throat singers and the venue’s first stand-up comedy gig. That’s as well as the recently introduced film programme which is luring new audiences with old favourites, Hollywood hits and art-house curiosities.

Designed by Richard Murphy, the arts centre is a 2m conversion of a 19th-century church, featuring modern surfaces and warm wooden panelling reminiscent of the architect’s work on the Tollbooth in Stirling, and Dundee Contemporary Arts. The theatre built into the top of the building has a flat stage, strong acoustics and steep auditorium seating more than 200. On ground level is a studio for meetings, rehearsals, exhibitions, children’s shows and overspill from the small caf-bar that opens on to the lane outside in the summer. Shields took over from founding director Brian Loudon and was in place for the building’s opening in March. "I was at the stage where I was really going to have to stay at the Assembly Rooms until I retired," she says. "The move was overdue but it was such a perfect job."

Despite the success of the inaugural season, Shields is showing no signs of complacency. She’s already programmed the Eastgate until September and is making long-term plans, including the possibility of producing new work in collaboration with Borders-based theatre companies.

The building has already been used for conferences and wine tasting evenings, and Shields is trying to capitalise on its appeal as a place for corporate events. In October she’s hoping to host a children’s book festival. However things pan out, though, she knows she has an audience only too happy to tell her what it thinks. "You can’t avoid the feedback," she says. "That’s really one of the most amazing things about the job.

"In Edinburgh we had a sophisticated marketing system to work out who the audience was. On paper you knew what they liked to drink or where they’d heard about the show, but there was no intimacy. Here you know virtually individually what people think and I like that. It means you can really start to make the programme evolve."

The Eastgate Theatre and Arts Centre, Peebles (01721-725 777), www.eastgateart.com