UR TV CAST

In Leeds, Jude Kelly has a major international co-production lined up, involving the dance-theatre company DV8 in a new version of Oedipus.Of course, language barriers cannot be magicked away. Such negotiations are tricky, but as Thelma Holt, doyenne of international production, asserts, if the British have a talent apart from theatre, it’s for diplomacy.Another co-production – in which Nottingham’s artistic director, Martin Duncan, directs Teatro Kismet, Italy’s leading children’s theatre company, in a new British adaptation of Pinocchio – hits the stage in June, then tours Italy, France and Germany this autumn, and then Britain. While initiated by and premiered in Nottingham, this project would be co-produced with the Hebbel Theater, Berlin, the Odon in Paris, Theatr Clwyd and Glasgow Tramway. In the refashioned map of theatre, Jude Kelly says, this country would consist of “a series of regions, including London – and it would be good for London to think of itself like that for a while”.Nottingham Playhouse, for example, is currently negotiating for an autumn production of The Tempest to be directed by the brilliant Romanian, Silviu Purcarete. And the work, designed to tour Europe and Britain, is free to bypass London.

For a start, they are full co-productions and hence authentic instances of cultural cross-fertilisation. They are art-led, in that they have sprung from a patiently nurtured sharing of tastes and a common vision. The results of a botched international shopping spree were, so to speak, whipped in and out, like the flowers in some glossy fashion-shoot.The initiatives now coming from regional theatres such as the West Yorkshire Playhouse and the Nottingham Playhousepoint the way forward. The selection criterion for appearing in this metropolitan showcase was nothing more elevated than that the various foreign companies presented should be able to pay their own way or secure their own funding. No money was forthcoming from this end; there was precious little interaction between the visiting artists and their English counterparts. Last year’s “Everybody’s Shakespeare” festival at the Barbican dismally illustrated the disadvantages of the old ways. Well and good, but the key question remains: does this spreading of commercial risk inspire theatres to live more adventurously on a creative level?There is one area where the answer to that question is a decisive and salutary yes: if you look at the international initiatives now afoot – particularly co-productions and the new links being forged between theatres here and overseas – you can see that, in pointed contrast to our political masters, British theatres are refusing to drag their heels over Europeanisation.Jude Kelly, the artistic director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse, says that, where international work was concerned, the regions used to be “on a drip-feed from London”; this situation, she says, is now in an interesting process of reversal.

You must take risks to revitalise, but those risks could kill you.” The kinds of collaboration and co-production that now proliferate in theatre are risk-spreading exercises, and they exist across the board: from Frank Gero’s West End Producers’ Alliance, which collectively raised the money to mount David Mamet’s The Cryptogram, to the fact that last year a Touring Partnership was set up by eight regional houses with the aim of making classic plays available to more theatres at a lower cost. With closure on the cards, it makes no more than good economic sense for, say, the Bristol Old Vic and the Cheltenham Everyman to consideramalgamation. Are there signs, though, that as it approaches the 21st century, British theatre is transforming economic necessity into artistic opportunity?Bill Alexander, artistic director of Birmingham Rep, describes the dilemma the regional repertory theatres face: “We walk a tightrope between regeneration and oblivion. We are all wondering which one of us will go over the cliff next.”

In using this apocalyptic image in a recent letter to the Guardian, Philip Hedley, the artistic director of the Theatre Royal Stratford East, was not referring to any lemming-like dash over the edge on the part of theatre practitioners; rather, he was painting a graphic picture of the eroding base of British theatre, an erosion which the Government seems cheerfully prepared to countenance.
In these cash-strapped times, when a regional venue like the Leicester Haymarket is entering its third year of standstill Arts Council grant, it is neither surprising nor edifying, a cynic might argue, that a so- called “culture of partnership” should be changing the face of the theatre world. “Working in British theatre feels like working in a certain hotel in Scarborough.