TOMORROW night is the last chance on home turf to see the final show directed by Ian Brown during his ten-year tenure as artistic director at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

“I feel pretty good actually,” he says. “It’s time for me to have a breather. I don’t think artistic directors should stay for more than ten years, as you’re in danger of over-staying your welcome. You should leave with them thinking, ‘Oh, it’s a shame he’s going’.

“It’s good to have someone having a fresh go at it, and though it was a hard to make the decision last year, now that I’ve adjusted to it, I feel positive about moving on and I’ll go with some fantastic memories.”

Big challenges lie ahead for the Playhouse, he warns.

“It needs someone with fresh energy to take on those changes and challenges. I have fought my funding battles and it’s time for someone else to address the considerable challenges that are faced by the Playhouse to bring people what they want.”

Already Ian is booked in for a return to the Playhouse in a freelance capacity, directing the 2012 Christmas show, Wind In The Willows.

In the meantime, he bows out from his artistic directorship with one of his most audacious productions: the first all-black staging of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot by a British cast, in a touring co-production with Talawa Theatre Company.

“Ultimately it’s still the same play but it certainly lends itself to this interpretation,” says Ian.

“Hearing voices that are not Irish or English, giving it West Indian accents instead, suits it very well, and it becomes a play about black people rather than the Irish tramp story we’re used to.

“Culturally, doing the play this way, we see it slightly differently and it makes us think about what the rope around Lucky’s neck may suggest. It alerts you to the possibility of slavery without saying it, and we’ve also thought about the Windrush generation who came with such high hopes but have lost all that power, status and hope.”

Ian has been delighted with how his decision to use an all-black, Afro-Caribbean cast has been vindicated.

“I noticed when Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart did the play with northern accents it didn’t work with Beckett’s language, whereas it suits the Trinidadian lilt,” he says.

“It also brings in a potentially different audience and you want the audience to be as wide as it can be. If all plays look like plays for white audiences, then you have to do something to change that, to broaden it.”

Waiting For Godot is an apt choice for Ian’s valedictory production as artistic director, being a play that makes you contemplate mortality, where your life is going, what is important in that life and how you can make the most of it.

“It’s very easy to get caught up in things that don’t matter,” he says. “If there’s one thing this difficult age is doing, it’s making us ask questions like ‘How can we support yet more shops?’. Maybe our lives will become simpler and maybe we can all benefit from that.”

• Waiting For Godot ends at West Yorkshire Playhouse this weekend; performances at 7.45pm tonight and 2.30pm and 7.45pm tomorrow. The tour runs from March 6.

Meet man who is taking over

JAMES Brining has been appointed as the new artistic director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse, in the wake of Ian Brown’s decision to step down.

The Leeds-born and raised Brining, artistic director and chief executive of Dundee Rep in Scotland, will be returning to his birthplace, charged with taking one of Britain’s largest regional producing theatres into the future.

“I am hugely excited by the opportunity to return home and lead this great theatre into a new era,” he says.

“I look forward to bringing the many strands of my experience together at one of Britain’s leading cultural organisations and to working on both Playhouse stages, as well as providing platforms for other artists to make extraordinary work.”

He wants to develop a culture of creativity and excellence, building partnerships at home and throughout Britain, as well as overseas.

“Theatre is a vital element of our cultural and social fabric and I aim to ensure that West Yorkshire Playhouse is a place where people have life-enriching and transformative experiences,” he says. “It’s our job to throw open the doors and welcome people to the Playhouse with unforgettable, world-class work.”

Brining’s directorship will begin in late Csummer 2012. He was appointed ahead of strong competition on account of his “compelling creative vision, inspiring programme of work and uncompromising passion to engage on a national scale with a regional focus”.

Welcoming the theatre’s new creative leader to the Playhouse, chief executive Sheena Wrigley says: “James Brining has a strong sense of how a theatre deeply rooted in its locality can have a rich and resonant national voice. His experience, creativity and vitality will be central to shaping a dynamic future for the theatre.” Brining has a wealth of experience as a stage director and in running a regional venue. During Brining’s tenure, Dundee Rep has won and been nominated for more TMA and Critics Awards in Scotland than any other Scottish theatre and the company has toured in Iran, Mexico and Japan and throughout Britain.

As a director, Brining has created premiere productions of newly commissioned plays by Scottish writers such as David Greig and Stephen Greenhorn, as well as presenting reinterpretations of contemporary drama and revivals of classic plays.

His productions of Sunshine On Leith and Sweeney Todd won the TMA Best Musical award in 2007 and 2010 respectively and he is at present working on the first major revival of Zinnie Harris’s drama Further Than The Furthest Thing.

In his previous role as artistic director of TAG Theatre Company, Brining developed projects with and for young people from across Scotland, a strand of work that he has continued at Dundee Rep.

He has also directed site-specific theatre, radio drama for the BBC and opera on London’s South Bank.

Brining will be joining the West Yorkshire Playhouse in an economic climate where the board believes it is vital that the Leeds theatre pushes boundaries, challenges its audiences, stimulates debate and provides a shared experience that can be enjoyed by all.

Chairman Sir Rodney Brooke says of Brining’s appointment: “Audiences are becoming more discerning, more willing to speak out and have more desire to be heard. A cultural experience is now an interactive one on many different levels. With this in mind it was vital to appoint a new artistic director who had the ability and the drive to take this flagship theatre into a very demanding and sometimes ambiguous future.”