By the time you read this, Arts Festival Dunedin will be into the fourth day of its day season.
Some festival events started early and your columnist went to one on its opening night on Saturday September 17, The Fortune Theatre's production of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker.
It has been well reported and well reviewed. I can only add it was an excellent performance of a brilliant play - for many years now a classic - and highly recommend it.
In the 2012 festival, the Fortune staged Samuel Beckett's eight-minute three-actor Play in the former Standard Insurance Company building, then under restoration in Princes St.
It was a bit like a demolition site inside and the characters were each in a large urn surrounded by rubble. It was mostly dark but lit again and again by light trained on different urns as different characters spoke. It was a brilliant idea for a setting.
It was a similarly clever stroke to locate The Caretaker's performance in a wharf shed, shed 40 in Fryatt St.
The play is about people at the lower end of society in a derelict building in still war-damaged 1960 London. Shed 40 is not derelict but its interior is very dowdy and made more so by a stock of shabby props on stage for the performance.
The audience was immersed in just the right surroundings and director Lara Macgregor (The Fortune's creative director) is to be congratulated on the ingenious choice of setting.
And the actors deserve congratulations, too. Ken Blackburn played the manipulative homeless man, one of whose names is Davies. Kip Chapman was the disturbed but persistently helpful Aston whose exact connection to the dilapidated building he inhabits, surrounded by junk, takes a while to emerge.
And Jason Whyte plays his brother, a sort of would-be wide boy who is also rather odd but in a more perturbing way. These are complex characters engaged in a complex interaction and their rendition of it is compelling. The warning's been issued - you need a cushion and a blanket - but it's certainly not to be missed.
There are many other good offerings. Nicholas McBryde is now back at the helm of the festival he invented. Last time, 2012, it was in other hands. On that occasion there were problems and Mr McBryde thought that might result in fewer gigs but it hasn't: there are 35, as many as ever, a total of 95 performances.
The event has been rebranded so instead of having an Otago Festival of the Arts as all were from 2000-2012, we now have Arts Festival Dunedin. With the Town Hall and Glenroy back in action there isn't the shortage of venues this time.
Mounting such an event is an ambitious undertaking in a city of 120,000 people set in a sparsely populated hinterland at a considerable distance even from the other more populous New Zealand centres, let alone those of the larger world.
But Dunedin has long managed to do very well in the arts considering the daunting obstacles. These are less challenging for the visual and literary arts because their producers don't need to be near their audiences.
It is different for all the performing arts because they are delivered direct. Although arts festivals embrace the visual and literary, they are, at core, primarily about performance.
It was thus a bold step when Mr McBryde conceived and delivered the first festival in 2000.
Its success of course is not his alone but it is his energy and honed administrative, organisational and negotiating skills, his wealth of knowledge, contacts and judgement which have kept it alive and have now revived it when it might have gone into a decline.
Or at least, that's what I expect as I write this before it has opened. But simply getting this year's programme together with its enticing list of events is an achievement already, particularly in the wake of the last festival's aftermath.
I don't say this simply to rake over old ashes but to underline the precariousness of a venture so bold as these festivals. They can come to depend very heavily on the abilities of a few exceptional people and the wider community needs to know this.
We have seen the consequences played out over 40 years with the varying fortunes of The Fortune Theatre. There have been periods of stability and excellence interspersed with others of uncertainty and decline.
These aren't all down to local demographics and individuals. They are affected by changing central government policies, too.
This column tries to track the immediate but also these wider, shifting things. When the shows are over and everything is counted, it will be time to take another look. Meanwhile, enjoy the festival.
Peter Entwisle is a Dunedin curator, historian and writer.
