It is clear that Jackie Wylie, even two months into her tenure as artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland, will be a different kind of leader for the company.
Unlike her predecessors, founding artistic director Vicky Featherstone and her successor, Laurie Sansom, Ms Wylie is not a rehearsal room director.
She will not direct her own plays: she is a 'creative producer'. Instead, she says, her job is steering the course for the company, bringing creative teams together with an idea, play, or project in mind, and, it seems, pushing at the boundaries of what the NTS does and means.
This boundary-pushing could be seen at her previous tenure, at The Arches, the closed and, in the arts world, much lamented former venue underneath Glasgow's Central Station.
She laid out some broad themes: she is passionate about younger audiences, about international collaborations, and about the "R&D" of exploratory theatre.
Ms Wylie, who grew up in Edinburgh and attended Boroughmuir High School before Glasgow University, is also the first Scot to be in charge of the company. In conversation this week at her new place of work, the resplendent new HQ of Rockvilla, in north Glasgow, it is clear she is emphasising the 'national' remit of the role. There appears no imminent danger that the company will, in the warning words of her predecessor, Mr Sansom, become the 'national theatre of Glasgow'. Her interest in 'landscape' as a initial theme for the theatre in the future, even if not fully defined at present, underlines her passion for what she called 'the national' element of the company's name. She also, personally, has family connections to the Hebrides, and reiterated the NTS commitment to the Gaelic language. It is some way before Ms Wylie unveils her first season, and more tangible evidence of her vision and design for the NTS will be evident in that document.
The poet and playwright Liz Lochhead, among others, have pondered whether the NTS takes its role in promoting the 'canon' of older Scottish plays as seriously as it pursues the best of the contemporary.
Ms Wylie would not be drawn on specifics, but she did say her keywords were 'balance', 'audacity' and 'ambition'.
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