ArtScape: After five years as director of the Belfast Festival at Queen's and almost a year as the first head of culture and arts at Queen's University, Stella Hall is to take up a challenging new job as creative director with the Newcastle-Gateshead Initiative (NGI), where she will head up its culture10 programme, writes Jane Coyle.
She was headhunted for her new post, but had to undergo a rigorous selection procedure of psychometric tests and interviews before being appointed. She admits that when approached, she could have refused.
"It's true, I could have said no, but the pull of what's being done in Newcastle-Gateshead was simply too strong. After just missing out on the European Capital of Culture bid, they decided to go ahead and put the plan into action anyway. A real partnership has been forged between the arts, sport, destination marketing and business, where the far-reaching, long-term value of culture is fully recognised." She remains optimistic that such laudable joined-up thinking will eventually take place in the North, but regrets that at present it is not happening. She believes it is incumbent on the arts world to get out and about, talking to politicians and business leaders and making the case.
The contrast between the two regions is vividly reflected in the present and future budgets, which Hall will be handling. A staggering £58 million (€86 million) has been invested in the culture10 programme, over a period of 10 years. The budget for this year's Belfast Festival is £850,000 (€1,266,000), a paltry sum for a major international arts festival.
"We have taken a drop, in spite of all the hard work, the incredible artistic successes and official recognition of the value of the festival to the life of Northern Ireland," she says. "A government strategy for festivals, which was presented to ministers two years ago, still has not been executed." She recalls standing in the Botanic Gardens with 7,000 people on an evening in October 2003, watching the Sticky spectacular unfolding and sharing the public's excitement, exhilaration and curiosity. On the downside, she cites her hurt at the level of criticism aimed at the festival.
"It has been dispiriting to read press coverage about the festival losing its way and not serving its audience in south Belfast any more. In response to previous criticism about it being elitist and concentrated, we have built on that audience and reached out to a wider public."
Although she officially takes up her new post on September 1st, she intends seeing through the 2005 festival in October/November, not least because she "would not want to let down my brilliant team, whom I consider to be the crème de la crème of Northern Ireland arts administrators."
Arts Council backs Abbey
One of the subjects that cropped up this week at the Arts Council's briefing on their draft strategy was the Abbey. Chairwoman Olive Braiden denied the council had been damaged by the latest crisis, saying that it was a private company and that the board makes its own decisions about the theatre. She welcomed the Minister's decision to continue funding the theatre via the council and said it was important for the independence of the Abbey that there was a buffer between it and the department. Director Mary Cloake commented that as the Arts Council's own fortunes went up and down over various budgets, bigger arts organisations such as the Abbey have tended to bear the brunt of drops in the council's own funding. They were "paying the penalty now for those years".
There was discussion about how the Abbey's corporate governance was under scrutiny, and how many smaller arts organisations had parallel problems that will only surface when a big problem emerges. Some arts bodies are "not particularly well run" and without enough foresight in the composition of boards, said arts programme director John O'Kane. "There's a need for the sector to face its responsibility in this regard and align itself with accepted good practice," he said, adding that board members should have a range of backgrounds - artistic, managerial, accounting and marketing.
Cloake stressed that financial issues were not the only important ones at board level, but that artistic vibrancy is also a concern, and board support for the artistic director.
The council's draft document, along with policy statements, is downloadable from www.artscouncil.ie, or by post by phoning 01-6180230. This wide trawl for ideas is a response to criticism of the council and of the now abandoned Arts Plan, and there is an opportunity to feed into long-term arts policy. The council is asking for people to prioritise, by July 1st, which of the 300 proposals in the draft are the most critical.
The Bard visits China
Shakespeare's As You Like It got a Chinese twist this week as the Bard's popular comedy came to Beijing's elite Central Academy of Drama under the direction of Dennis Kennedy, who is Samuel Beckett Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at Trinity College Dublin, writes Clifford Coonan in Beijing. The trials of Orlando, Rosalind et al struck quite a chord with the Beijing audience, particularly as the song and dance element was not unfamiliar to Beijing Opera fans.
Graduates of the Central Academy of Drama feed directly into the Chinese film industry; among its graduates are director Zhang Yimou's former muse Gong Li and rising star Zhang Ziyi, who recently starred in House of Flying Daggers.
"With this kind of talent you know you are going to come up with something good," said Kennedy after the first performance at the academy's theatre, which lies down one of Beijing's romantic hutong laneways in the old part of the city. Shakespeare is read more than performed in China and the first full translations only arrived in the 1920s but in recent years there have been big productions, notably the Royal Shakespeare Company's Merchant of Venice in 2002.
Kennedy, a world expert at staging Shakespeare, was approached by the cademy to put on the play but one of the requirements was to find parts for as many actors as possible - there are 27 in all.
Because gender confusion is a big element of the play, Kennedy decided key players would change during the performance, the men replacing the women and vice versa. "We saw a thematic possibility here," said the American, who is planning to stage Guys and Dolls in Dublin next year.
The themes of unrequited love, brother fighting brother and gender confusion clearly struck a chord with the cast, who during the performance sit and change costumes before getting up to perform their parts. The closing dance routine had a decidedly Celtic feel, as the actors happily jigged to the air of Lord of the Dance and the audience clapped along.
The Shaughraun opened this week in London, with colour stories about a homesick dog (the dog playing Tatters is coming home and the company has held auditions for a local moggy) but without universal acclaim for the show. The Guardian's Michael Billington hated it, saying: "This production may have delighted Dublin, but it would have done a service to Irish theatre if it had stayed there." He called it "an evening of self-conscious heartiness" with a "mood of relentless joviality". He does praise the set and some performances in "this ingratiating farrago" but he also says: "McColgan's production takes us back to square one with skirt-brandishing, Riverdancing colleens, pantomime peasants and an affected, eye-fluttering heroine who suggests Fenella Fielding in intimate revue. Instead of good storytelling and an exploration of Boucicault's seminal play, we get an exported Irish 'entertainment' that ends with the inevitable knees-up." Could do well at the box office there too, then.
Stuart Carolan, playwright and radio producer (and formerly Navan Man), whose Defender of the Faith premiered at the Peacock last year, has won this year's George Devine award in London. A film version of Defender of the Faith is to be shot by Noel Pearson this year. He won the award for most promising playwright jointly with Laura Wade for Breathing Corpses. Carolan is in good company - previous winners include Edward Bond, Mike Leigh , Hanif Kureishi, and Irish playwrights Billy Roche, Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, Enda Walsh, Mark O'Rowe and Gary Mitchell.