When Sean Doran left Belfast to become director of the Perth International Arts Festival in March last year, he knew he was moving to one of the most isolated cities in the world. But he had no idea just how isolated he would become.
His first festival, presented over three weeks in January and February, with works by international artists such as Robert Wilson, Philip Glass, Deborah Warner and an 18-hour Chinese opera, was praised as daring and exciting by critics around Australia and had the second-highest box-office takings in the event's 48-year history.
This week, however, Perth's newspaper, the West Australian, ran a gloomy editorial pronouncing that there was "a deep-seated malaise within the state's major cultural event and the dissatisfaction can only be put down to Doran's management".
A bemused Doran, who is contracted to produce three more annual festivals, replied yesterday that his job was to run a marathon and "people want to judge me in the first 100 metres".
In Perth and as far away as Sydney (think Dublin to Moscow), the arts community is burning to know how the distinguished young Irishman and Australia's oldest arts festival have come to grief so dramatically.
The unavoidable fact is that despite its critical and box-office success, the 2000 festival finished with a deficit - depending on how you slice it - of £500,000, £1.3 million, or possibly more.
Festival staff, already under stress after a period of rapid change, have been understandably more anxious since getting the bad financial news. Turnover has been high since Doran's arrival, jobs have been created and abolished, and a long search has failed to find a permanent general manager brave enough to wrestle with the deficit.
The discontent erupted last week with the resignation of Lynda Dorrington, artistic director of the Perth Writers' Festival, under Doran's umbrella, announcing she wanted "to draw the industry's attention" to what she considers "the total mismanagement of the Perth festival". The next writers' festival has been cancelled as a result, although it will return in 2002. Since then other former staffers and artists have joined the sniping.
All this seems an age removed from Doran's arrival. Those who know him, supporters and critics alike, still talk about the man's charm, enthusiasm and creative energy, which pour out in conversation, even through his current dismay.
The same qualities impressed the board of management of the University of Western Australia, owners of the Perth International Arts Festival, when they mounted a national and international search for a successor to Yorkshire-born David Blenkinsop, who was retiring after 23 successful years as director and chief executive.
It was time, the board decided, to enlarge and restructure the festival and to find a visionary director to shape its long-term development.
Derry-born Sean Doran had returned to his home country only two years earlier as artistic director of the Belfast Festival, attached to Queen's University.
There he had to overcome audiences' fear of going into the streets and in his first year he increased attendances by 25 per cent. He introduced fringe and children's festivals and gave a twist to the 13-year appearance of the Royal Shakespeare Company by insisting it present a season of Samuel Beckett plays, in a working-class part of the city.
Doran, now 39, is a clarinettist by training, a lover of literature, music and the visual arts, and has also run a musical theatre, the UK Year of Literature in 1995 and an arts festival in Derry, through which he felt he contributed to the peace process. So why move to Perth, a city of 1.6 million people clinging to the remote south-western coast of Australia?
"I was reluctant to come," he admitted. "If the job had been advertised I wouldn't have looked at it. But I was head-hunted and offered this one-off exciting opportunity in a culture that has a republic debate, the Olympics and the centenary of federation celebration all within 12 months."
With his wife, Finola O'Doherty, and their young son, he has adapted to life in an ocean-and-desert-bound city where he feels the distinctive "potency of place" and yet still has a largely Anglo-Celtic audience.
At his first festival, pulled together in less than a year, with a budget of £3.5 million, the only sign of his roots was the staging of Conor McPherson's popular The Weir and an Australian production of Tom Murphy's play The Gigli Concert.
THE expansive programme gave the passionate Perth audience a sense that it was truly part of - and even ahead of - the international arts scene.
Among the offerings were a 400-year-old Chinese opera, The Peony Pavilion, previously staged in New York, Paris and Milan; English director Deborah Warner's The Angel Project, fresh from London, and staged in empty buildings around the city; the Netherlands Dance Theatre; and the innovative American theatre director, Robert Wilson, who signed up for four years, starting with the Stockholm City Theatre in Strindberg's A Dream Play (going to London next year) and finishing with a production for a local company.
Australian artists were also plentiful in the festival, and for the first time Doran funded a fringe festival, spun off a strong writers' festival, and ran a late-night live-music club, the Watershed.
Doran is determined that short festivals must take artistic, and therefore financial, risks. Surprisingly though, it was not the obviously risky endeavours that let him down.
Money was lost on the Watershed, which did not appeal to the festival faithful but began to attract the younger patrons all festivals seek, and the outdoor film festival, a sure-fire moneymaker in past years, is now competing with other summer film venues.
Doran argues that the £1.3 million deficit is not strictly accurate because £750,000 of that was approved by the board of management before the festival to finance a new management structure and long-term artistic projects. "It wasn't a loss, it was an investment," he said.
Even so, the full £1.3 million will have to be absorbed over the next three years, which will necessitate a "tighter festival working to a responsible budget", according to Prof Deryck Schreuder, vice-chancellor of the University of Western Australia and chair of the festival board.
Exactly what that means will be unclear until Doran announces the 2001 festival programme in October. One casualty, he said, could be a centrepiece event that would cost less than the £375,000 he paid for The Peony Pavilion but still be too expensive.
Duncan Ord, general manager of Perth's Black Swan Theatre, fears it will be local arts that suffer in the cutbacks. Prof Schreuder insists the board is strongly committed to the festival and to Doran, describing the 2000 festival as "the most successful festival artistically in the country in the last year". The former festival director, David Blenkinsop, also enjoyed much of his successor's festival but that doesn't stop him from being "deeply distressed".
"I left the festival in very good shape, with a strong reputation nationally and internationally. It had the best part of my life and it hurts me that within 12 months it has gone to the bottom of the pond."
He blames a lack of financial experience on Doran's part and says he warned him he was crazy to restructure the festival management.
Doran hopes to devolve some artistic control to a layer of curators and programming directors beneath him, who will help to fill the gaps in his knowledge.
"I knew nothing about Australian culture until I came here," he said. "But then I know nothing about Romanian culture either."
In the force of the attacks on Doran there is perhaps a whiff of resentment against a foreigner taking over a much-loved local event and rushing to overturn tradition. He is aware of being described as "Irish" more often in the Australian press than anywhere else.
He makes no apology for the grandeur of his ambition. But he also says being Irish helps him to relate to the people of Perth. "When you're creating change a lot of people feel a sense of loss. I come from a culture where that's what it means."
Susan Wyndham is an arts writer with the Sydney Morning Herald
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