EDEN COURT THEATRE found itself much in the news in July, albeit without actually doing anything. A banner front-page headline in the Press & Journal suggesting that the theatre would miss all of Highland 2007 proved to have nothing concrete to add to the current understanding of the situation, which is that the theatre is still scheduled – but not certain – to re-open sometime in the final third of the year.

Councillor Roddy Balfour, the chairman of Highland Council’s Education, Culture and Sport committee, was then unwise enough to say in a broadcast interview that he regarded the investment in the Highland’s leading arts venue as a waste of money, an alarming opinion from such a source.

So where does the theatre stand? The official line remains the same – an announcement will be made on re-opening when they have a definite date, and not before, and it will be accompanied by a full programme.

As matters stand, the theatre have announced their panto, ‘Peter Pan’, scheduled to begin on 6 December, and Scottish Opera have announced several performances of two operas in November. If the theatre failed to honour either of those commitments, it would certainly be a major embarrassment, not to mention very costly.

It may be that the theatre will be operational for an opening before the work is fully completed. In any case, what matters in the longer term is that the theatre is completed in satisfactory fashion, and gets back to doing what it is there to do.

Elton John’s visit to Inverness seems to have passed off very successfully, and launched InvernessFest in some style. The organisers were quickly talking about the possibility of bringing other major names to the city, although whether the economics would stack up without the generous wedge of H2007 money is another matter.

The festival itself seems to have gone reasonably well, although I did attend one event that had to be cancelled because there was no one else in the audience, a bit of a contrast with the near-18,000 that turned out for Elton. The festival club in Falcon Square seems to have gone well, and the Salm and Soul concert at Inverness Cathedral on the closing weekend was a definite highlight.

As for August itself, well, the festivals keep rolling in. Speyfest and the new NessFest at Fort Augustus (dedicated to Celtic music) set the ball rolling, while the Tartan Heart Festival at Belladrum goes into its fourth year, and repeats the two-day format established last year.

If it has a much reduced proportion of Highlands & Islands artists in the new format, it remains a family focused event with a broad appeal. In our From the Archive feature, we revisit our interview with festival director Joe Gibbs from last year.

The Nairn International Jazz Festival, the Mull of Kintyre Festival, and Runrig’s Beat the Drum at Drumnadrochit all follow during the course of the month, and Blas launches on the last day of the month, but is largely a September event.

Georgina Coburn interviews Murdo Macdonald on an potentially very significant development for visual arts in the Highlands and Islands in our lead interview this month, while the Elgin-based Out of the Darkness are the subject of our HITN profile [or that was the plan, at any rate – unfortunately, the company have not delivered their profile, so we will retain Tabula Rasa for August – Ed.]

Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned our tolerance of long articles last month. No sooner had we set a new record length on the site with Robert Livingston’s essay on the Third Eye Centre than Rody Gorman has topped it with an 8,000-plus look at his work translating the songs of Bob Dylan into Gaelic (although, as he explains, it really goes beyond simply translation – if translation can ever be simple).

We have adopted a similar tactic of offering the article as a downloadable PDF file, and have taken a similar approach with Ian Stephen’s log of the An Sulaire’s voyage around the top of Scotland from the Artist’s Workshop on Tanera Mor to the Moray Flotilla.

James Munro visited the Mendelssohn on Mull festival last month, and reports back with a look at the origins and future prospects of the event, combined with a diary of his visit. Visual artists Jon Macleod and Anne Campbell document their ‘A-Mach an Gleann’ project on Lewis.

We have been aware that we were not really able to do justice to the visual aspect of our visual arts reviewing using our standard review template, and we have begun to add a supplementary page on which we are able to provide more and better illustrations of the work on show, when we have access to them.

That page can be accessed from a link at the bottom of the review, and we hope it represents an improvement to our coverage. As usual, more of everything to come in the course of the coming month.

Kenny Mathieson
Commissioning Editor, Northings

Kenny Mathieson lives and works in Boat of Garten, Strathspey. He studied American and English Literature at the University of East Anglia, graduating with a BA (First Class) in 1978, and a PhD in 1983. He has been a freelance writer on various arts-related subjects since 1982, and contributes to the Inverness Courier, The Scotsman, The Herald, The List, and other publications. He has contributed to numerous reference books, and has written books on jazz and Celtic music.