The road and the smiles

"What an amazing play," Brining says of Further Than The Furthest Thing, Zinnie Harris's breakthrough work about an island community forced out by the eruption of a volcano. "It's extraordinary, but it isn't that well known. It's got such richness and scope in its themes.

It's about religion, capitalism, displacement, refugees, deceit, truth, lies. It's about epic themes and domestic themes. The more you mine it, the more you find in it.

"My wife's from Orkney, and being Leeds born and bred, I'm not really a country person. But when I got to know Orkney, I started to have a sense of what it's like to be on an island, and to be physically surrounded by that much water, and with a sky so huge and with the horizon so present. It does something to the dynamics of life. I became interested in that just as a geographical environment, and the isolation that can bring, but also the sense of community it engenders, both good and bad. So there's all these personal reasons for doing this play, which I think can be emotionally devastating."

Another influence on Brining's choice was an exhibition by artist Elizabeth Ogilvie at Dundee Contemporary Arts, just across the road from the Rep, which showed work that utilised water and light. With Ogilvie drafted in to advise, Neil Warmington's set for Further Than The Furthest Thing will see the Rep stage flooded with 29,000 litres of water.

Such scale and ambition have been a feature of Brining's tenure in Dundee ever since he became chief executive and joint artistic director of the theatre with Dominic Hill in 2003. Dundee Rep had already been transformed by the creation of a permanent acting ensemble by previous artistic director Hamish Glen, and when Brining and Hill came in as a package, it broke the mould again. Over the next few years, while Hill concentrated on re-inventing the Rep space with productions of Howard Barker's Scenes from An Execution and a rollicking new version of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, Brining seemed to look to more popular fare.

Musicals in particular have become a Dundee staple, with Brining directing the little known Flora The Red Menace as well as Gypsy and Sweeney Todd. It was his production of Stephen Greenhorn's Sunshine on Leith, however, that has been one of the Rep's biggest hits to date.

Ostensibly a Proclaimers juke-box musical that was clearly a winner from the start, Greenhorn's play had a credibility to it that went beyond the one-dimensional plotlines of similar vehicles. In a bold move, Sunshine on Leith took on two commercial tours. "We learned a massive amount doing that," Brining says. "People think that commercial theatre is all about spending massive amounts of money, when in actual fact you're fighting over every penny."

When Hill left Dundee to run the Traverse in Edinburgh, Brining stayed in Dundee, combining productions of Christmas shows such as Cinderella and A Christmas Carol with meatier fare including Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

If the incorporation of Ogilvie's ideas into Further than The Furthest Thing show off some of the synergies that now exist between the Rep, DCA and other organisations as part of Dundee's ongoing cultural renaissance, it also hints at Brining's skills as a diplomat, politician and producer which have come into play just as much as in the rehearsal room.

"I don't think every director either can do it or necessarily wants to do it," Brining says. "You have to end up balancing different parts of your brain and different responsibilities. I wouldn't be interested in just being a freelance director who directs plays.

"That's not enough for me. I want to have some kind of control over the environment and the circumstances in which the work is being made, and also the bigger point of why we're doing the work that we do. What is the point of having a theatre in Dundee? What sort of work do we want to do, and what sort of relationships do we want to have, not just with the people who come and see plays here, but with everyone in the city?

"But things go in cycles. I'm really proud of some of the work we've created, especially latterly. We've done big shows, ambitious things, but the ebb and flow of that is that as an artistic director you have to have a level of patience, and think for the next nine months that you're going to be concentrating on a particular thing for the organisation, or you do a particular show in order for something else to happen. It's the bigger picture that interests me, but there's also a necessity to go into that rehearsal room, close the door behind me and to lose myself in the play, I guess, just to remind myself what it's about. The two things for me provide a healthy and necessary equilibrium.

"There's a broader point here as well about who should be running theatres, and if it should be a practising artist or not. For me, if the person leading the organisation is going into a rehearsal room and engaging with the technical staff and everyone else, that kind of keeps you honest. I am on the line when we're doing a show along with everyone else, and if I mess up then I'll carry the can for that. If I was just talking about policy and everything else, you can talk about that forever, but if people see you sweating because you care about a production so much, that's important, because it's a reminder that, actually, what matters is what happens onstage."

Brining hadn't planned Further Than The Furthest Thing to be his final production in Dundee. When he was offered the job, he was some way in to planning projects for next season, including She Town, a new play based around female mill workers in Dundee. Brining was also set to direct J B Priestley's Time and the Conways in a co-production with Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum Theatre. Both of these will now be picked up by the Rep's associate director Jemima Levick, who must be considered a strong candidate to take over from Brining in Dundee.

"Nine years in one place is quite a long time," he admits. "I have to say as well that there are a thimbleful of jobs I would have been interested in, and there are very few places I want to live in apart from here. I hadn't planned to leave Scotland, but the job in Leeds just came up.

"I have a sense of the importance of West Yorkshire Playhouse to the city. When I was growing up there was Leeds Playhouse, which was part of the old poly. I remember going there as a kid, but when I left Leeds to go to university, that's when West Yorkshire Playhouse was being built. Then it opened when I'd mentally left Leeds, but I'd always watched its impact on the city, even though I'd never worked there.

"There's a certain point in your head when you're not interested in other jobs, because you've not been there long enough, or you feel like you've not completed enough but after eight years I was definitely getting a sense that it was probably time to start thinking about a new challenge for myself. I think also it's good for the theatre to have a new set of co-ordinates around itself. If I'd still been here after 10, 12, 15 years, you'd be able to see it in people's faces wondering why I was still here and thinking I'd be here forever."

Brining arrived in Scotland in 1997 to run TAG, a post previously held, incidentally, by outgoing West Yorkshire Playhouse director, Ian Brown. His career as a theatre director began at Cambridge University before he decamped to Newcastle to run a company on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. Brining worked at the Orange Tree in Richmond, where he first met Hill, and later ran Proteus theatre company in Basingstoke.

"There was something about Scottish theatre that suited me," Brining says of the move north. "Theatre of all the artforms explores identity the best, and Scottish identity is always up for grabs."

Such an attitude sees Brining leave Dundee Rep in pretty good shape. Not only is there an ongoing confidence in the work onstage, but as an organisation the Rep appears to be a tightly-run ship. As evidence of this, at the time of writing Dundee Rep is the only arts organisation in the country previously backed by the Scottish Arts Council as a three-year Foundation-funded body to be given a guarantee of a similar status by Creative Scotland over the next three years.

"The way my time in Dundee has flown by is scary," Brining reflects.

"Nine years have felt like three years. The same ideas are still in place as were here when I arrived in Dundee, but the goalposts are always shifting, and that's not just about my own work. It's everyone involved in Dundee Rep who make it a success, and I really believe that a theatre has to contribute something to the local community. The challenge for whoever takes over here is to make sure it keeps evolving."

Further Than The Furthest Thing, Dundee Rep, April 24-May 5. www.dundeerep.co.uk