The Stage

Welsh National Theatre expects first show in 2008

Published Tuesday 31 October 2006 at 12:35

Wales’ new National Theatre company is set to debut its first ‘branded’ show in the spring of 2008, it has emerged.

Arts Council of Wales chief executive Peter Tyndall told The Stage that he believes the board that will head the new company will be appointed early in the new financial year, followed soon after by an artistic director.

He added that the company would copy the model of the recently launched National Theatre of Scotland. Tyndall said: “We have seen Scotland and we have decided that the head of the company will be a director rather than a producer.”

Tyndall was speaking immediately after Welsh culture minister Alun Pugh had announced the allocation of an extra £500,000 in next year’s budget for the theatre and the work it would commission.

Last summer, Pugh set the scheme rolling with a promise of an initial £250,000 from next year’s budget towards the estimated eventual £2 million annual revenue cost.

Political pressure for arts expansion in Wales to extend beyond the capital city into the industrial valleys means a likely headquarters for the institution is the multi-use culture centre in Merthyr Tydfil, for which Pugh had the previous day announced a capital grant of £250,000.

The core of the new company would be a world class director who would commission and, on occasion, himself direct work from existing companies in Wales. The non-building based organisation would play on existing stages, on the lines of the model recently adopted in Scotland.

Arts council chairman Professor Dai Smith, former head of drama at BBC Wales, said the conclusion of decades of pressure for a national theatre in English should lure first class talent back to Wales. He foresaw the theatre staging around six plays a year throughout Wales, two of them from the classic Welsh canon, two from more popular writers such as Frank Vickery, plus new writing. “The people of Wales must be able to see themselves dramatised,” he said.

• Three sites are being investigated as location for the Merthyr culture centre, which would be similar to the recently-opened Galeri in Caernarfon - a theatre and arts centre with facilities for small creative businesses and individual artists. The only facilities gap then remaining in Wales would be at Wrexham.