All the world’s a stage

When Scottish culture is being promoted more vigourously than ever before, does it matter that manyof those at the helm of such promotion come from outside the country, asks Tim Cornwell?

Across the country, Creative Scotland – with its bi-lingual business cards – loudly champions Scottish culture, while the National Theatre of Scotland is plotting the course for its second five years, riding hits from Black Watch to The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart.

But, in a strange irony, many of the standard-bearers at the helm of its cultural flagships are non-Scots. The director of the Edinburgh International Festival Jonathan Mills is Australian. Andrew Dixon, the first chief executive of Scotland’s new arts agency, Creative Scotland, is English and has spent his career in the North East of England. The first director of the National Theatre of Scotland, Vicky Featherstone, hails from Surrey. Does it make a difference, and is it any reflection on Scottish talent?

Many of those leading a new generation of exploring, developing, and exporting Scottish culture have an outsider’s eye. Like Dixon, Lucy Bird, the new head of Marketing Edinburgh, is another import from just down the East Coast line. Councillor Deidre Brock, Edinburgh’s convener for culture and leisure, is originally from Australia, where she trained and worked as an actor, though she has lived here since 1995.

The stellar departing music director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Stephane Deneve, is French, and his replacement is British-Canadian; the general director of Scottish Opera, Alex Reedijk, is a New Zealander, though with a long experience of the festival and arts scene here before he took the job; his music director is Italian.

Mills, who still owns a home in Melbourne, now finds himself cherishing a colder climate, and wondering if his distant Scottish ancestry has made him feel instinctively at home here. “Somehow Scotland’s climate is much more in tune with my body temperature,” he said, musing on how he first bonded with Scotland on a visit to Cumbrae Island as a ten-year-old choirboy.

When Dixon arrived last year, he says: “I made the fairly bold statement that I probably knew more about the geography of Scotland than people who had lived here all their lives. I certainly do now. I’ve been everywhere.” And Featherstone, who made her first young foray to Scotland as a tiny child, living here from six months to the age of seven, says: “The reason I wanted to do this job is because of Scotland.”

She was attracted because of the people she would work with, from David Greig to his fellow playwrights John Byrne and Scotland’s Makar Liz Lochhead. “They are brilliant Scottish voices who culturally and politically speak in a voice I relate to,” she says. “One of the things that I do say, is that I’m in love with Scotland and with every aspect of it, and I feel that my role is to show Scotland to itself in all its beauty and its glory and show that to the rest of the world.”

At the Edinburgh International Book Festival this summer, Byrne, a grandee of Scottish arts and author of The Slab Boys and Tutti Frutti, complained that Scotland does not value its theatre. “When did you last see a Scottish play in the West End? Never,” he said. “But Irish plays? Lots and that’s probably because they love their artists in Ireland, and they don’t love them as much here.” It was Dixon who challenged Byrne’s complaint, and championed the work that’s been done for Scottish theatre. In an interview, he banged the drum for Scotland’s achievements, and said he felt Byrne was “completely out of touch.” Scottish work had a strong showing in this year’s festival, he said, while international touring for Black Watch and a string of other productions was more important than “kowtowing to the theatre establishment in London.”

“I think in coming in, I’ve had the privileged overview of everything that’s happening,” says Dixon. “And I have been able to join things up a bit. That’s not because I brought anything somebody didn’t have, I had just that freedom to take a new look at Scotland. I think there’s been a bit of a cultural issue in Scotland of being shy about its success. If we’ve done anything, it’s starting to champion some real success stories.”

It was Scottish novelist Muriel Spark, who coined the phrase “Scottish by formation,” and everyone interviewed for this article agreed that nationality makes no difference. “I don’t think it matters at all if the person is prepared to throw themselves totally into Scotland with a view to the bigger world, as opposed to coming in an outsider and remaining an outsider all that time,” says Byrne. “If they are not prepared to do it, if they set out with a slightly superior attitude, they are never going to learn. They are all on their way somewhere else, and Scotland’s just a stepping stone.”

There are long-standing concerns that Scottish talent is overlooked at home in a version of the “Scottish cringe.” One Edinburgh arts veteran questioned privately why Scottish arts administrators had failed to win senior appointments at Creative Scotland. Scottish architects have asked why major commissions, from a new building at Glasgow School of Art, to the new V&A museum at Dundee, must go to international “starchitects”.

All those interviewed, though, agreed any restrictions on recruitment would be disastrous. “If we have ambitions for Scotland to welcome the world through culture, then we need to welcome people from across the world for expertise,” says Dixon.

Mills, meanwhile, says he is proud of “the degree to which we have encouraged within my organisation people who are Scottish to develop their own careers,” and, indeed, there are Scots in prominent positions, including the National Museums Scotland director, Glasgow-born Gordon Rintoul, who has overseen the multi-million overhaul of the Royal Museum building – designed by Scottish architect Gareth Hoskins. – while Donald Runnicles, the popular chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, is an Edinburgh born and educated musician who made his biggest career breaks in Germany.

There is one clear example, however, where a national institution’s treatment of Scottish art became bitterly contentious. The former long-time director general of the National Galleries of Scotland and consummate Englishman, Sir Timothy Clifford, was seen as “despising” Scottish work, particularly in the row over his plans for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

His successor, the Edinburgh-educated John Leighton, born in Belfast, plans to overhaul the National Gallery of Scotland on the Mound, to give more room to Scottish art, which is widely seen as languishing in tired basement rooms.

The Scotsman’s arts critic Duncan Macmillan, says that under Sir Timothy, the National Galleries moved away from Scottish art while the public embraced it. Asked about non-Scots running national institutions, he adds: “It shouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter if the institutions were stronger and hadn’t been weakened in their national awareness by generations of people.”

Mills, a former director of the Melbourne Festival, was unknown in Scotland when he was appointed to the EIF post in 2006. He has extended his contract to champion Scotland’s festivals through next year’s Olympics and the Commonwealth Games in 2014. Asked if there are any borders in culture, he says: “I think there aren’t. Getting to grips with Scottish culture at one level you can do quite quickly but at another level it takes a lifetime. You can understand the very basic architecture of it quite quickly, but to really understand it properly, particularly in terms of history and the effect of that history and in terms of language, it takes you years.” Working here, he has discovered that “on my maternal grandmother’s side I’m from Partick, but five of my eight great-grandparents are Scottish or partly Scottish.”

Featherstone has worked closely in her post with Scottish writers like Greig – himself born in Edinburgh in 1969 and brought up in Nigeria. She recalls: “I moved here when I was six months old and spent the first seven years of life here, my brother and sister were born here, we moved to India and Germany, so I didn’t live in England until I was 13.” While she made her career down south, she says: “I don’t see myself as coming from one particular area, or one particular place Why are there a high percentage of people in positions of cultural power that aren’t Scottish? I think it’s a complement to Scotland that they want to do the job, that they come here because Scotland is so extraordinary.”