Know your market ... Liverpool (pictured) is a long way from Adelaide. Photograph: Don McPhee
I feel sorry for Robyn Archer. I don't know if you noticed, but she's just decided to quit as artistic director of Liverpool's 2008 European City of Culture with plans, allegedly, in some disarray.
If I feel sorry it's because I've known Robyn, on and off, for some time and always admired her. She's a fantastic singer and cabaret performer who, arriving unknown from Australia, wowed London audiences in the 1970s with a show called A Star is Torn. Robyn is also an artistic visionary who directed a wonderful Adelaide Festival in 1992 that artfully mixed the established with the avant-garde. But, for all her many gifts, it seems she didn't understand the peculiar character of Liverpool.
This raises a much bigger question. Who is best equipped to run a city's cultural jamboree? Without being unduly parochial, I'd suggest it is someone with an understanding of local needs. Robyn Archer made a big success of Adelaide in 1992, as Jim Sharman had in 1982, because she was clued in on Australian tastes. But, intriguingly, the American director, Peter Sellars, was invited to succeed Robyn in Adelaide and was eventually forced to quit.
The irony is that Sellars, an artistic and political radical, tried to give Adelaide a "local" festival: one based on an ambitious programme of South Australian films and Aboriginal art and drama. All very admirable; except that Adelaide, by virtue of its geographical isolation, looks forward every two years to the importation of some of the great orchestras and theatre companies from around the world.
In short, it's a matter of horses for courses: festivals, in my experience, are best created by people who possess not just taste and vision but an awareness of the cultural context. Edinburgh is a case in point. Some look back fondly to the long reign of the Dutchman, Peter Diamand, as director of the International Festival from 1966 to 1978. But although Diamand may have been brilliant on the musical side, his theatrical choices were often woeful. And I would credit his successors, John Drummond, Frank Dunlop and Brian McMaster, with doing much to restore the balance not just between music and drama but between the international and the local. None of them were Scots; but they all understood Edinburgh's needs.
This may seem a churlish way of greeting Edinburgh's new director, the Melbourne-based Jonathan Mills, who takes over from McMaster in 2007. But I suggest he will have to learn a lot very quickly about Edinburgh's peculiarities: not least the inherent tension between the International Festival and the Fringe and the strange conflict between Scotland's resurgent nationalism and the sometimes crabby attitude of its funding-bodies.
It's all a far cry from Melbourne, and Mills will soon discover - if he doesn't know already - that Edinburgh craves maximum quality for minimum outlay. I wish him well; but, at the risk of sounding chauvinist, I suspect that big arts events are an expression of civic identity and are best run by people who understand local politics and passions.
Haven't we just discovered, to our cost, the folly of putting a Swede in charge of the English soccer team? I just hope Mr Mills doesn't turn out to be Scotland's cultural equivalent of Sven.
