SHOW PEOPLE / A winner against the odds: Helena Kaut-Howson

ON FRIDAY Macbeth, starring Timothy West, opens at Theatr Clwyd; to be followed next month by August, Julian Mitchell's Welsh adaptation of Uncle Vanya, starring Anthony Hopkins in his own production. In London, Imogen Stubbs is keeping the Strand afloat with Saint Joan - another Clwyd show. All three events originate from a company that was on the point of collapse last year, and have been realised without a penny of public money.

The author of this feat is Helena Kaut- Howson, Clwyd's artistic director, an artist who has done wonders on the regional stage and with two generations of Lamda students, but who has not hitherto had much truck with stars and big commercial deals. So far as stars are concerned, the foundations had been laid by her predecessor, Toby Robertson, who regularly coaxed famous names to his hillside fortress with hopes of then catapulting them into the West End. In the case of Hopkins (a South Walian), national loyalty is also involved; and he has agreed to go back and do a show a year, with the prospect of seeing Clwyd's rebirth as the National Theatre of Wales. If, that is, there is still a company for him to go back to.

The present situation recalls the bad old days of director-boardroom battles in the 1960s. Clwyd is a council-owned multi-purpose arts centre, and its theatres are the only part of the operation not certain of making money. It may be that, in spite of this year's critical esteem and healthy box-office figures (siphoned off to clear a deficit accumulated during the previous regime), the governors would like to do away with the risk of theatrical ambition altogether, and run a shoe-string company with no artistic director. At all events (pleading the need for 'flexibility' at a time of local government reorganisation), they have refused to renew Kaut-Howson's contract when it expires next June, even though this decision has lost them the support of the Welsh Arts Council.

The crowning absurdity of the whole sorry episode is that Kaut-Howson, with her double dedication to Wales and Europe, is supremely qualified to raise Clwyd into a national institution, along the lines of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Everyone at Clwyd speaks of her 'vision'; and perhaps it is precisely that which has scared the governors off. As she put it in a recent television interview: 'As a freelance director, I have been planting a little tree in other people's gardens. By coming here, I got seduced by the idea of planting an orchard: what trees there should be, and how they should fit the soil of this landscape, and yet how their crowns should extend into the sky.'

Helena Kaut was born during the Second World War in Lvov, the daughter of a Jewish tailor killed by the Germans, and a resourceful mother who went into hiding before later surfacing in Wroclaw as the second person in the town to join the Communist Party. Aged four, Helena saw Aida, and was much distressed by the tomb scene. 'Don't worry,' her mother said, 'tomorrow they'll be up there again.' Fantastic, the little girl thought - no death] That was when the theatre caught her. She trained at the Warsaw Theatre School, carrying off the kind of official prizes for which Grotowski's actors (then regarded as amateurs) were competing in vain. She made two trips to London as an actor, with the Ida Kamiska Company and the Warsaw Contemporary Theatre. Then, expelled from Poland after her marriage to the son of a Nato admiral, she emigrated to Britain and began a new life as a director.

I first saw her work in the late 1970s when she was running a company called The Actors' Soup Kitchen (now Arts Threshold) which was designed to give Lamda graduates a bridge into the profession. One show, an adaptation she'd made from the stories of Isaac Babel, plunged you into the savage melancholy of underworld Odessa and succeeded in transforming the cramped old Half Moon Theatre into an epic space. Another was Werewolf, a Polish rural tragedy by Teresa Lubkiewiez, which she and the company not only reset in Ireland but also translated into West Cork dialect. It was not the standard repertory. And later, when she lured Janet Suzman to Greenwich for one of the best performances of her life, it was in Gorki's Vassa, another unknown play.

Even when the material is familiar, her treatment tends to place it in an imaginatively widened perspective - as with last year's Playhouse transfer of Jane Eyre, in which Charlotte Bronte made contact with Tadeusz Kantor and the Lowood orphanage extended to the Warsaw ghetto. It is her gift to take you from the known to the unknown, without betraying the point of origin.

Her Clwyd policy is a combination of close-up and long-distance. She casts actors previously only seen on the Welsh-language stage in main-house shows (as in the forthcoming Macbeth). Equally she puts out advertising leaflets designed by Andrzej Klimowski, whose surrealist graphics stem from the grand tradition of Polish poster art. In a piece like Full Moon, her production faithfully reflected Caradog Prichard's portrait of Welsh village life, but coupled it with the visual magic of Witkiewicz. 'In Central Europe,' she says, 'there isn't an existence that hasn't been affected by wars and revolution, so we tend to look at reality as a combination of individual destiny and history. That strongly informs my perception of what life, and the role of art, is about.' I can think of no other British-based director who is in a position to say that. As a fine artist with something unique to contribute, there is no doubt of her professional survival, whatever the outcome of the present boardroom wrangles. The survival of Clwyd without her is another matter.

'Macbeth': Theatr Clwyd, Mold (0352 755114), Fri to 8 Oct.

(Photograph omitted)