A decade of achievement in the arts
When it was discovered that a new auditorium with a deep-thrust stage could after all be accommodated within the existing building, the redevelopment was finally able to proceed. Meanwhile a sequence of acclaimed productions included the 2007 Complete Works festival, when all Shakespeare’s plays were performed by the RSC and visiting companies from afar afield as Japan, the United States and South Africa.
Birmingham Rep also began the decade in need of revival after a period under artistic director Bill Alexander which had consistently won admiring reviews from the London press but meagre audiences from the Birmingham public.
Alexander’s successor Jonathan Church seemed to find a winning formula straight away, exchanging his predecessor’s policy of doing less more deliberately for one of presenting as much work to as wide an audience as possible, deliberately blurring the distinction between home-grown and visiting productions.
Church’s production of Of Mice and Men was a big national success on tour, and other notable achievements of his era included the first major revival of the trilogy of plays by David Hare, first seen at the National Theatre, exploring the Anglican church, the legal system and the Labour Party.
But in December 2004 the Rep unexpectedly found itself at the centre of an international incident when Behzti, a play by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti depicting scenes of rape and murder taking place in a Gurdwara, prompted violent demonstrations by Sikh protestors which succeeded in closing the play.
The Church regime never really regained its buoyancy and in 2006 Church moved on to the Chichester Festival Theatre. Under his successor Rachel Kavanaugh the Rep has continued to attract large and often multicultural audiences, but at the cost of a certain blandness and further erosion of its identity as a producing theatre.
It seemed that its thunder might be stolen by the Belgrade Theatre, which reopened in 2007 with an ambitious international season after an extended redevelopment, but a diet of German expressionism proved a bit rich for the Coventry public, and the Belgrade is still seeking an ideal balance between artistic enterprise and populism.
However, its flexible studio theatre, B2 described by Sir Trevor Nunn as one of the most exciting theatre spaces in the country, is a significant new asset for the region and the model for the new auditorium Birmingham Rep will acquire as part of its shared development with the new Library of Birmingham.
The new library was one of Birmingham’s most contentious projects of the noughties, and one in which I have to declare an interest, having been on the steering group for the original scheme in Eastside, which got as far as a concept design by Richard Rogers Partnership. It was then derailed by the incoming Tory-Lib Dem coalition, which suppressed a report from its own independent consultants when it effectively recommended continuing with the Rogers scheme as the best – and cheapest – of all solutions for the library.
The vision for Eastside as a major new cultural and learning quarter has subsequently unravelled, and criticism of the new scheme for a library on Centenary Square, designed by Dutch architects Mecanoo, can largely be boiled down to the fact that its volume has to be accommodated on a site which is scarcely big enough for it.
A vociferous band of enthusiasts for 1960s brutalism fought a gallant rearguard action to prevent John Madin’s existing library having visited on it the fate which it inflicted on Birmingham’s listed Victorian library. After what seemed an interminable wait, secretary of state Margaret Hodge finally refused to protect Madin’s flawed masterwork by listing it.
Doubts were raise by the Government’s architecture watchdog, CABE, as to whether the city could ensure that the quality of Mecanoo’s design would be delivered. If there is an object lesson on the value of not skimping, it is surely to be found nearby in Symphony Hall, where acoustics were always the supreme concern but the physical fabric, already nearly a decade old at the Millennium, still shows little sign of ageing today.
Nearly 20 years of musical history have soaked into the walls there to add to that in the fabric of the revived Town Hall. These two venues, both magnificent in their contrasting ways, are now run jointly with a co-ordinated planning policy.
While the CBSO was somewhat eclipsed on the national stage by the renaissance of the Halle under Mark Elder, it held its own as a major international orchestra under Sir Simon Rattle’s successor, Sakari Oramo. Highlights of the era included Oramo conducting a revelatory performance of Elgar’s The Apostles, written for the Birmingham Festival, at the Proms and an extraordinary poll which identified the complete Saint-Saens piano concertos, with pianist Stephen Hough accompanied by the CBSO and Oramo, as the best-ever award winner in 30 years of the Gramophone Awards.
In 2007 the CBSO revealed that Oramo’s successor would be the young Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons. Already marked down as one of Europe’s hottest young talents, Nelson’s reputation has continued to rise during his first season and a half in charge. His recent CBSO concerts have rubbed shoulders with engagements at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and Covent Garden.
The next significant addition to the city’s cultural infrastructure will be the reopening of MAC in Cannon Hill Park next spring. Although some may find its painted corrugated-iron cladding hard to love, its interior facilities should function more effectively and a custom-designed gallery will be an important addition to the city.
The visual arts, historically a poor relation in Birmingham, have show signs of stirring into life – particularly in Digbeth, where the new outpost of Ikon Eastside, the artist-led Eastside Projects and Vivid media centre have started to create a long-anticipated arts quarter.
Birmingham and Walsall were successful in winning a £1 million grant under a new scheme from the national charity The Art Fund, aimed at creating a new collection of contemporary art which could lead to a proposed new museum opening in Birmingham. The Art Fund is now poised to lead a national campaign to secure the Staffordshire Hoard, the sensational collection of Anglo-Saxon gold discovered in a field near Aldridge in the summer, for the West Midlands.
Much of 2003 was taken up with the competition to be named European Capital of Culture. Birmingham eventually lost out to Liverpool and there was a feeling that unlike the favourite Newcastle/Gateshead, which succeeded in transforming external perceptions with the stunning image of the Sage music centre alongside the River Tyne, Birmingham got little out of the bidding process except self-recrimination and a further loss of self-esteem.
Perhaps unwarned by evidence that there is little public affection for the city elsewhere in the UK, Birmingham ends the decade bidding for a similar but smaller prize – UK City of Culture, a new initiative introduced by the Government in an attempt to spread the success of Liverpool 2008 to other cities.
In the final list of 14 contenders just released, Sheffield is the next largest city in contention. Clearly none of the other runners can match Birmingham’s cultural critical mass (it is the only one with a professional orchestra). But the nagging thought remains: how will they stop us getting it this time?
