Looking past the theatre of war

Published on Sunday 10 December 2006 00:55

BY ANYONE'S reckoning it's been a phenomenal year for Vicky Featherstone. At the start of February no one had seen a production by the National Theatre of Scotland, the shape-shifting organisation to which she was appointed artistic director in 2004. By the end of November, her company had been behind no fewer than 28 shows, including the acclaimed Black Watch, the popular hit Tutti Frutti and Roam, the only play ever performed at Edinburgh airport.

Featherstone, 39, would have good cause to be complacent but, as she announces the NTS programme for the next six months, she steadfastly refuses to rest on her laurels. "I'm our harshest critic," she says, sitting in her Glasgow office. "I'm amazed at how much of our work has been good and it's very exciting in terms of what we can build on. But I really don't sit here and think: 'God, haven't we done well?' All I see are the things we could have done better."

She's not being disingenuous. Featherstone is thrilled the company got off in such spirited style, delighted at the PR boost provided by Black Watch and Anthony Neilson's Realism in the global shop window of the Edinburgh Fringe and Festival, but she knows that, in the precarious world of theatre, fate could easily have swung the other way. There was nothing assured about the success of Gregory Burke's play about the Black Watch regiment. It was the audience that made it a hit. Featherstone's job is now to capitalise on the huge public demand - it's touring to a still-to-be-announced list of drill halls between March and July around Scotland - and to follow up with other, equally powerful productions.

"Black Watch has become owned by Scotland," she says. "It took place in a non-conventional space so the experience of the audience was very visceral. The concept wouldn't work in a conventional theatre, so we've really had to push the boundaries of where it can go when it tours in 2007. It means our biggest success will go to drill halls and factories - spaces we'd never have imagined our biggest show would go to."

What makes her most proud are the audiences she's reached. At least 100,000 people have seen an NTS show and a further 30,000 have participated in youth and community programmes. "It's quite extraordinary that we've managed to attract so many people in eight months," she says. "There is an audience who already go to the theatre and who support our work in classics like Mary Stuart, which had fantastic audiences, but we've also been able to excite new and younger audiences."

Of course, it would be a rare company that produced 28 shows without its disappointments. The critics were generally lukewarm about Chris Hannan's rewritten Elizabeth Gordon Quinn and Featherstone's own staging of Schiller's Mary Stuart. The three shows by the semi-autonomous NTS Young Company came in for a bit of a mauling and the community shows got a mixed reaction. Featherstone has been in the game long enough to roll with the punches, but she is anxious to find a way to protect less experienced practitioners from the scrutiny the NTS brand attracts.

"Context is everything," she says. "There's a danger that if the NTS name is on something people feel it should have the same effect on them as Black Watch, Tutti Frutti, Roam or Realism. I want to do work that doesn't have that status and that can exist for communities and young people. We've still got work to do about how we communicate that."

She takes heart in the realisation that the shows with the biggest buzz have involved the greatest creative risks. "It's those shows where we've said: 'The NTS can be anything, let's look at the way we make theatre.' It's not that the other shows don't work, it's just that when a risky piece really hits, it hits like nothing else."

First among these was Home, the inaugural NTS event that took place over a single weekend on a boat in Shetland, a tower block in Castlemilk, a deserted tenement in Aberdeen and seven other unlikely locations. "In terms of the overall idea, I think Home was our most successful project," she says. "I'd love to do something similar in another year."

If any company is duty bound to be adventurous it is the NTS which, from April 2007, will take its 4.1m funding directly from the Scottish Executive, bypassing the Scottish Arts Council. Keeping things fresh has been easy in this first defining year, but Featherstone shows no sign of getting set in her ways.

"What I have learned this year is to be brave enough to jump into the unknown," she says. "Somebody said to me: 'What Scottish play are you touring in the Elizabeth Gordon Quinn slot?' We don't have an Elizabeth Gordon Quinn slot. Bringing back brilliant Scottish plays is part of our agenda the whole time. At the moment we're trying to get the main blocks of the programme for the two years ahead, but we will always leave space for work that is reacting to new ideas."

That said, the next six months look to be a period of consolidation with a smaller number of productions taking longer tours. "The season is a fascinating mixture of us having to respond to our immediate successes, which we didn't expect, and still developing new work," says Featherstone.

AS WELL AS Black Watch, which is also expected to travel internationally in 2008, there will be the return of John Byrne's Tutti Frutti, playing for two weeks at the King's, Glasgow from April 12, as well as a second run at the King's, Edinburgh and a stint at Blackpool Grand.

Another old favourite is back in the form of The Wonderful World Of Dissocia, Anthony Neilson's evocation of the highs and lows of mental illness which played in the Edinburgh International Festival in the pre-NTS days of 2004. Committed to bringing previous Scottish successes to a wider audience, the NTS is reviving the show for a lengthy tour beginning at the Tron, Glasgow on February 28 and taking in Dundee, Edinburgh and London.

Fulfilling her mission to bring an international dimension to the programme, Featherstone has masterminded a collaboration between Glasgow's Tramway and Belgium's Victoria, one of Europe's most arresting companies. Aalst takes its name from the Belgian town where, in 1999, a couple checked into a hotel with their children, only to check out a week later when the children were dead. The tragic story has been widely seen in Victoria's own Flemish version, but this new staging will be translated by Shetland writer Duncan McLean, who is breaking his seven-year creative silence since Bucket Of Tongues. Pol Heyvaert's production opens at Glasgow's Tramway on March 21, and stars Kate Dickie (of Red Road fame) and David McKay (My Name Is Joe), plus the voice of Gary Lewis (Billy Elliot).

Another Scottish novelist reaches a new audience as actor Tam Dean Burn tours his one-man adaptation of 2004's Venus As A Boy by Luke Sutherland. Thanks to clever scheduling, the production will travel the same route as the transsexual prostitute Desiree in the novel, opening at the St Magnus Festival in Orkney on June 25 and passing through Ullapool before a run on the Edinburgh Fringe and a finale in Soho where the novel ends.

On a bigger scale, Futurology: A Global Revue is a cabaret-style show involving all the associate artists of Glasgow's Suspect Culture. Addressing the questions of global warming and climate change, the black comedy opens on April 9 and promises to be among the most unusual offerings at Glasgow's SECC, Edinburgh's Corn Exchange and the Aberdeen Exhibition Centre. "It's interesting that political cabaret is always used as a form of theatre at a time of change," says Featherstone.

Still to be announced is the programme of the NTS Young Company and the community-focused strands of NTS Learn. Further ahead, the company will be part of Jonathan Mills' debut programme at the Edinburgh International Festival and has "big projects" in store for the autumn. "I'm really excited about a lot of the projects people are developing with us," says Featherstone. "Long-term there's masses of stuff."