Should all-women season be worthy of remark?

WHEN the National Theatre of Scotland unveiled its new season last month, the accompanying publicity photograph gathered seven of the creative minds behind it around a table – and five were women. From February to November 2019, work by women will be touring and opening across Scotland and overseas under the banner of the Theatre Without Walls. This week Glasgow Citizens Theatre announced a season of new works by Stef Smith, Zinnie Harris and Frances Poet, and made a point of promoting it as a season of female-scripted and directed work.

On the same day, the Royal Scottish Academy announced that a female artist, Joyce Cairns, had been elected as its president, a switch of gender in the post that the organisation has managed to achieve slightly less than a decade before it celebrates its bicentenary.

Change is in the air, and sometimes not before time. Herald theatre critic Neil Cooper noted that the all-women year of new work at the Citz stood in marked contrast to the rejection of Ena Lamont Stewart’s classic Scottish play Men Should Weep by the theatre company’s founder James Bridie.

That was an error of a few years back, however, and it is at least worth asking whether an all-women season in a Scottish theatre should really be worthy of remark these days. The National Theatre of Scotland has had a woman at the helm for most of its existence, initially Vicky Featherstone and now Jackie Wylie. The Traverse is about to say farewell to Orla O’Loughlin, and there are women in charge in Stirling, Perth and Pitlochry, and most of those have female predecessors.

Initiatives to recognise and promote the work of women are important in a world where the male gender still has its hands on too many of the levers of power, but it is also important to acknowledge where there has been progress in recognition of those who have brought that about.

The PRS Foundation, an organisation spun off from the body that collects money owed to composers, has a current campaign called Keychange which aims to achieve a 50:50 gender balance at music festivals, across all genres, by 2022. When it published its original list of signed-up organisations, however, it scandalously omitted Glasgow Jazz Festival, which was one of the first to do so, having bucked the bearded, chin-stroking, ale-quaffing image of the music by having an all-female organisational team for most of its 30-plus year history.

In the music that has become my main sphere of activity recently, however, Scotland looks less on the beat. I can recall only one woman – Ruth Mackenzie, who is now running the Holland Festival – running Scottish Opera, and the three orchestras have all been exclusively male-only shops for the top jobs in administration and on the podium. Until very recently that is, because the return of RSNO chief executive Krishna Thiagarajan across the Atlantic, whence his predecessors also departed, has led to the promotion of the finance director he appointed, Angela Moreland, to the position of interim chief executive while the board consults its headhunters. If she herself is in the frame, it would give Scotland’s national orchestra the chance to be upsides with the London Symphony Orchestra, where Kathryn McDowell has been managing director since 2005.

Perhaps, though, the day will eventually dawn when pointing out the gender of the people in high profile arts jobs will become as reductive as those daft voices complaining about non-Scots leading Scottish organisations at the same time as Scots were being appointed to senior posts in London, Dublin and elsewhere. Which prompts the thought: of all Scotland’s many culture ministers since 1999, it has been the women who have shown staying power.