Andy Arnold

Andy Arnold is a British theatre director and the artistic director of the Tron Theatre in Glasgow.

Career

Arnold was the major force behind setting up The Arches, Glasgow's long running multi-arts venue, which was open from 1991 to 2015.

The site of the venue was a previously derelict area below the Glasgow Central railway station, which was converted to house the exhibition Glasgow's Glasgow during the city's year as European City of Culture. In 1991, after the exhibition had ended, the space was obtained by Arnold for the purposes of creating a theatre. Realising that theatre productions required substantial funding, Arnold decided to stage nightclub events to support his projects,^[1] and this practice continued until the venue's closure, the clubbing revenues helping to fund what became one of Europe's leading cultural venues. Arnold set up The Arches Theatre Company to perform interpretations of work by playwrights including Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, David Mamet, Harold Pinter and two unperformed works by the novelist James Kelman, generally receiving favourable ratings from the Scottish Arts Council. He was also inspired by the size and atmospherics of the space to put on unusual productions such as Arthur Miller's The Crucible in the building's damp, dark basement with the audience seated on church pews, Metropolis - The Theatre Cut, a promenade version of Fritz Lang's film featuring a cast of 100,^[2] and a staging of Seamus Heaney's translation of the epic poem Beowulf .^[3] For the building's fifteenth anniversary in 2006, Arnold conceived and directed the critically acclaimed production Spend A Penny, a series of one-on-one monologues staged in the venue's toilet cubicles, featuring work by playwrights including Liz Lochhead.

Arnold was appointed Artistic Director of the Tron Theatre in 2008. His first production for the Tron Theatre Company, The Drawer Boy, was highly acclaimed and since then he has also directed That Face, Cooking with Elvis, Bliss, Mud, the UK premiere of Defender of the Faith, the world premiere of Six Acts of Love, Suddenly Last Summer & Like the Rain for the Tron Theatre Company.^[4]

References