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When Kieran Hurley's new play Mouthpiece opens at the Traverse Theatre next month, it will mark a final bow for Orla O'Loughlin, the theatre's artistic director since January 2012. Come December, she will move on to become vice-principal and head of drama at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London; and this moment of her departure seems to mark a natural pause for thought in the history of Scotland's acclaimed new writing theatre, which still enjoys a global reputation for its role in discovering or fostering new Scottish playwrights from Stewart Conn, Donald Campbell and John Byrne back in the 1970s, to the current generation of younger stars - not least Hurley himself, whose recent hits include Heads Up and Beats.
In many ways, the seven years since O'Laughlin's appointment have been remarkable and traumatic ones, both for the arts in Scotland, and in much wider political terms. O'Loughlin has steered the Traverse through the independence referendum campaign of 2012-2014, and then through the geopolitical shocks of Brexit and Trump; and also through a time when arts funding in Scotland has been the subject of apparently endless debate and anxiety, with the first director of Creative Scotland, Andrew Dixon, resigning during O'Laughlin's first year in Edinburgh, and the second, Janet Archer, announcing her departure this year.
The Traverse was among the theatre organisations that took a sharp hit during the Creative Scotland funding round of 2014, suffering an 11 per cent cut in its grant which has never...