THE acclaimed Mull Theatre company has a new artistic director to guide it into a post-Covid future.

Rebecca Atkinson-Lord, who was hitherto producer and director with London-based touring theatre company Arch 468, took up her post as chief executive of Mull Theatre and sister arts organisation An Tobar last week. She will move permanently on to the Hebridean island next month.

The position of CEO of An Tobar and Mull Theatre, to give the company (formerly known as Comar) its full name, is a considerable one.

The director is undaunted by the various responsibilities of her new post.

She was CEO, producer and artistic director at Arch 468. Moreover, lest people think that she is a metropolitan seeking sanctuary in a Scottish island idyll, Atkinson-Lord is quick to underline her familiarity with communities such as Mull.

She grew up, she explains, “half” in “a very remote” village on the Greek island of Crete and “half” in the city of Wolverhampton, in the English West Midlands.

With reference to her Cretan experience, she says: “I know how it works to be part of a small community that can be quite insular, and which has a huge tourist influx every year.”

Her new post is, she says, “perfect” for her. “It’s right at the scale that I want to be working.

“I’m both a producer and director, so I want a CEO/artistic director job, because I like doing both things.” Also, she adds, Mull is “one of the most beautiful places on Earth, and the team are lovely”.

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BEING familiar, from her unusual upbringing, with both the country and the city, the director has become tired of “having to fight on the tube” to get to her place of work. “I think I’m probably done with London in a lot of ways,” she says.

Before accepting the job, Atkinson-Lord and her husband spent some time on Mull. The board of directors of the company invited them up “so we knew what we were getting into”. Hardly surprisingly, the visit sealed the deal.

Thanks to her own rural background on Crete, the director isn’t afraid of the prospect of living in a remote place. “I’m not frightened that, if someone has a heart attack, it requires a helicopter [to get them to hospital]. That doesn’t scare me off.

“I’m used to things not being on my doorstep. I’m used to being a bit more self-sufficient.”

Self-sufficiency will, one suspects, prove to be an invaluable quality in developing the programme of an island theatre company. “I really care about making theatre for a community that I know,” the director continues.

In her previous position, she ­explains, a lot of time was spent ­talking about the various “segments” of the audience identified by the ­English Arts Council, and how Arch 468 could best serve them. “That’s all well and good”, she says, “but, in this job, I can make sure that I’m serving Bob, because I know him, and I know what he cares about.”

THE community is small enough, she continues, that, although she can’t know everybody, she can be well enough connected with local people that there is a “reciprocal dialogue” between her and the community she serves.

Atkinson-Lord succeeds ­interim ­director of Mull Theatre Beth ­Morton, who has steered the ­company through the pandemic in 2020 and into 2021. Morton’s work as producer on Mull included the recent online animation series Braw Tales.

The new director is aware that, prior to Morton’s interim appointment, Comar, as it was known, went through a period of some conflict and controversy. In 2015, as part of the merger of Mull Theatre and An Tobar, long-standing and respected directors Alasdair McCrone of Mull Theatre and music director Gordon Maclean were told that their services were no longer required.

A veritable uprising against the board’s decision, both among the good people of Mull and in the wider Scottish arts community, forced a ­famous reverse. Needless to say, Atkinson-Lord is aware that such events, however satisfactorily they are resolved, can leave bad blood.

It is her hope and belief that, having had no horse running in the controversial races of recent years, she can sail Mull Theatre and An Tobar into calmer waters. She is, she says, aware that the company has had “a bit of a tricksy, crunchy past”.

However, she feels that she is in a good position to look to the future and take the organisation forward. “I’m a new person”, she says. “Hopefully I can make new relationships that aren’t too coloured by [past events].”

The director is also well appraised about a more positive aspect of Mull Theatre’s history: namely, its place in the Highland and Islands touring tradition. She knows that, in the 1970s, John McGrath and his 7:84 Scotland theatre company famously pioneered touring to village halls and school halls across the Highlands and ­Islands of Scotland.

She’s also aware that one of the companies to follow most actively in McGrath’s footsteps has been Mull Theatre. Highland and Islands touring is, she asserts, “right up there” at the top of her agenda.

Atkinson-Lord “likes a metaphor”, she says. When it comes to Mull Theatre’s strong connection with its community and its commitment to touring beyond the island, she is, she explains, “thinking of it as like a ­beacon”.

“It’s a small light that can be seen from a long way away. It guides people home, but it also shows them the way out into the world.”

The director likes work that can be pretty light on its feet, and she loves the typically small to medium scale of Mull Theatre’s productions. A show that can travel “in a van, with two suitcases and dog”, is ideal, she says.

She sums up her vision of theatre very succinctly: “We’re going to get together, we’re going to tell this story, then we’re going to go to the pub and talk about it.

“And we’re going to do that repeatedly, with everybody around our country. That’s really exciting.”