THE director of award-winning theatre production Black Watch has spoken out against critics of English "colonists" heading Scotland's creative bodies.

Yorkshire-born John Tiffany, outgoing associate director of the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS), has been involved in some of the company's most successful shows. He said the attacks, following the appointment of his friend and colleague Vicky Featherstone as NTS artistic director, were "not the Scotland I know and love".

"That's somebody who has decided to move her family and her kids and has taken an opportunity and is leaving a really robust company," he said. He said complaints referring to her Englishness were out of order.

Tiffany is rehearsing the latest NTS show Let The Right One In, which opens in Dundee next month. This summer he is leaving Scotland, after more than two decades, to reunite with Featherstone at the Royal Court in London.

Tiffany, who won a Tony Award for the Broadway production of the musical Once last year, is hoping his connection with NTS will not end. There is a possibility he will direct another project in the future and Black Watch is still on tour in the US. It opened a few weeks ago in San Francisco.

"I'm glad that that show is so successful there," Tiffany said. "I've spent a year at Harvard and I've been in airports where the vets have come back from Iraq or Helmand and you have to give them a standing ovation or you get aggression from people, and it's militarising that society."

He added it was unfortunate Black Watch was still relevant so long after its debut, "but I feel very privileged and honoured that a show I made seven years ago has still got currency."

In the Herald Magazine Tiffany also talks about Glasgow's Year of Culture in 1990 and of dancing with Bjork.