This article appears as part of the Herald Arts newsletter.

Following July’s news that playwright-turned-theatre chief David Greig was to leave his position as Artistic Director of Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum, thoughts turned to the identity of his likely replacement.

With Pitlochry Festival Theatre unveiling Alan Cumming as its Artistic Director from January 2025, you might have thought the sky was the limit for Scotland’s largest producing theatre. Some did. Would there be another A-Lister appointment to follow that one? Young Jack Lowden doesn’t have much on at the moment, could he do it?

The new man – and it is a man – has now been announced. He is James Brining, currently Artistic Director at highly-regarded Leeds Playhouse, formerly the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Not a household name, perhaps, but an accomplished administrator and a more than capable director.

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In his 12 years in Leeds, Mr Brining commissioned and produced 65 new plays and oversaw a £16.8 million refurbishment and re-branding programme. His predecessor at the Playhouse, for the record, was Ian Brown, who ran Glasgow’s TAG Theatre Company in the mid-1980s then spent over a decade helming Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre.

“The man is exceedingly normal,” wrote the Yorkshire Post’s Nick Ahad of Mr Brining in 2012, the year he was appointed to the Playhouse job. “An hour-and-a-half interview felt like a gentle chat over a pint.”

Mr Brining is actually from Leeds, but he knows Scotland and, importantly,........

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