Capital Hill

That balance has produced some notable coups during his tenure at the Rep. His award-winning presentation of Howard Barker's Scenes From An Execution, for instance, and last year's superb rendering of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Moreover, it has helped secure his recently announcedappointmentasthenextartistic director of the Traverse in Edinburgh, Scotland's self-styled forum for new playwrights. He will replace Philip Howard, the theatre's longest-serving artistic director, in January.

Hill's move to the capital is an intriguing one. Few people would dispute the assertion that he is one of the finest directors working in Scottish theatre today. However, he is best known as a director of the work of classical playwrights, from Shakespeare to Alfred Jarry and Samuel Beckett. Even his parting shot at the Rep is a 19th-century classic - a staging of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, the Rep's first co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland. So how will he fare with new work?

In fact, prior to his appointment at Dundee he directed a wide array of work, including a number of new plays as both a freelance director and as assistant director at companies such as The Orange TreeinLondonandtheRoyalShakespeare Company. Besides, he says, his approach to classic plays is always to make them relevant to the contemporary world. Peer Gynt is a case in point.

"I always had the perception of it as quite folksy, rural and soft-edged," he says. "I read it recently and I was amazed that it feels very accessible and very modern.

"It's about a guy in a small town who is a misfit and a poet, he loathes the provinciality he's been brought up in, he wants to be a celebrity. It's a universal theme."

Ibsen'scharacterissometimesseenasa quintessentiallylate19th-centuryfigure.An individualist and a reprobate, he comes from the margins of a Norwegian society which, in turn, is marginal to the great European imperial land grab in Africa, Asia and elsewhere. However, in his desire for fame and fortune, at whatever cost (both to his own soul and to the well-being of others), Hill discerns a deep relevance to our society in the early 21st-century.

"In Ibsen's original, Peer Gynt makes his money from slave trading and selling pornography to China. He's a deeply immoral person. In our version he's a people trafficker."

The play has been adapted for the Rep by Colin Teevananditisn'tonlyinGynt'sdubious "profession" that he has dragged the work into the present day.

"It's very rough, it's quite aggressive, it's got a lot of bad language, and it's quite in-your-face," says Hill. "I think it will appeal to a young generation, because it's very much about being a teenager."

The director professes himself "unsentimental" about leaving Dundee Rep. Nevertheless, he is clearlygratefulfortheopportunitiesand experience the theatre offered him.

"I'vehadfantasticopportunitieshere, opportunities that would be hard to get anywhere else, in terms of just being able to get on and do yourwork,ingreatconditions,withlong rehearsal periods."

Perhaps the Rep's greatest strength, though, is the fact that it maintains - uniquely in Scottish theatre - a permanent ensemble of actors. Hill is certain that the consistency and familiarity the ensemble provides has been a major factor in the theatre's recent success.

"I've been working with a group of people. I've got to know them, they've got to know me. That's meant that I could go in and say, Let's try and do it like this'. It's been quite liberating creatively. I'm going to miss that."

Uprooting himself from Dundee and taking up residence in Edinburgh will be a "welcome change" he says. There is, however, no talk of the stress of moving house, or of the burgeoning property market in the Scottish capital. The director is already focused on his vision for the Traverse and is relishing keenly the task of taking the wheel at a theatre which, in the view of some, has lost its sense of direction in recent years.

Hill is very much aware that his new venue is seen as the major player in the Edinburgh Fringe, but that there have been concerns raised about its programme beyond the festivities of August.

"I want the Traverse to be as exciting the other 48 weeks of the year as it is during the Fringe. I aim to turn it into a bit more of a creative powerhouse," he states, with the kind of relaxed certainty that only a fool or a genius would argue with.

"I want theatre artists in Edinburgh to feel that there's a home for them at the Traverse, that there can be space for them to develop and cross-fertilise. The Traverse just doesn't do enough work. Four shows a year, two in the festival, is not good enough, really.

"Part of it is financial, of course, but we have to find ways of ensuring that there's stuff on all the time.

"People should be able to walk into that building at any time of the year and be inspired by something, knowing that something's going on. At the moment, the only way to do that is going to be through partnerships with other people."

Those "other people" look certain to be very different from the kind of playwrights - young, often inexperienced - who have predominated in recent Traverse programmes.

ThelatestplaybyHowardBarker,whois neglected by the theatre establishment in England but revered by many in Scotland, sits on Hill's desk. The director will also be looking beyond the UK for many of his new plays, and taking account of the various other forms of theatre which are thriving in Scotland,suchasthepromenadeand site-specific work of companies like Grid Iron and Poorboy.

New writing, Hill argues, is not only writing by new writers. He talks about what he calls "the grown-up Scottish writers" - he means people like David Harrower, Zinnie Harris, Rhona Munro and David Greig - and of his desire to have them lead by example on the Traverse stage.

"I think it's about people of maturity and experience offering something that other writers can learn from," he says. He thinks the Traverse should be as much for these "grown-ups" as it should be for on-the-rise twentysomethings.

There can be little doubt that Hill plans a revolution for the Traverse, and that its effects are likely to be felt well beyond the Edinburgh theatre. Perhaps the greatest change will come in the aesthetic vision which he will bring with him.

"The great revelation for me from Barker's work is the realisation that, in the theatre, we can explore the things we dare not do, or the things we cannot do without being locked up, or the things that we dare not name. The whole point of that is engaging an audience in things you might only ever dream about. But you would never dream of having them acted out in front of you."

To some, Hill's will be an alarmingly radical vision of live drama. However, as he has proved at Dundee Rep over the past five years, it's a vision which makes for enthralling, engaging and entertaining theatre.

Peer Gynt runs at Dundee Rep until October 13