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Removed: article David Lan will bring flair to the World Trade Centre arts complex
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This article has been temporarily removed because it was launched too early and is in breach of an embargo. It will be reinstated at its correct launch time. It comes as no surprise to learn that David Lan has been appointed as a consulting artistic director to the new team at the World Trade Center. Although Lan has worked as a dramatist, director and film-maker, it is as a producer and talent-promoter that he has excelled in his tenure at the Young Vic. Although he doesn't look like a showman, he has a Diaghilev-like flair for bringing artists together.
He once told me that he saw the Young Vic as a "directors' theatre" in contrast, say, to a "writers; theatre" like the Royal Court. Over the past decade or more he has not only attracted top European talent, such as Peter Brook, Luc Bondy and the late Patrice Chereau to the Young Vic, he has also made it a London base for such outstanding companies as the Belarus Free Theatre and Iceland's extravagantly physical Vesturport and, at the same time, promoted young directors.
It was Lan who brought us Benedict Andrews's wildly inventive Three Sisters and Carrie Cracknell's equally exploratory version of A Dolls House which opens next week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. On top of all that he has bridged the gap between music and drama by staging a number of collaborative ventures with English National Opera.
An anthropologist by training, Lan is scholarly, dedicated and decidedly un-flashy. What he has is good taste, imagination and an international outlook.
It's also a measure of his passion for the work he does that he is not afraid to contact critics if he thinks they have missed the point of a pathfinding production. I've sometimes locked horns with Lan but, as an artistic director, he is in the front rank and New York will be lucky to benefit from his wisdom.