Northern star shines on National

The Royal National Theatre will look back on 2000 with mixed emotions. There have been peaks, including five Evening Standard awards, and there have been troughs.

One of the beneficiaries of the troughs is Jude Kelly, the artistic director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Her millennium production of Singin' in the Rain has been summoned from Leeds to plug not one but two holes in the Olivier's schedule.

Whether Kelly, a slender figure with a puckish crop, will now go on to stage other work at the National remains to be seen. Inevitably, her name will be tossed into the hat, as it was last time, when the moment comes to discuss Trevor Nunn's successor, especially as she says, "I probably would be looking for a different challenge soon."

Kelly was the first to spot the potential of director Matthew Warchus and launch him on the world. She provided a home from home for an Ian McKellen disillusioned with the London stage (they are planning something else for next year). And she has enticed Patrick Stewart to Leeds for a forthcoming production of JB Priestley's Johnstons over Jordan. She is also a distinctly audible rent-a-quote on matters theatrical, in a manner that has the mutterers reaching for the A word: "ambitious". But oddly from such a high-profile figure whose 25-year career has taken her from the Solent Theatre to Battersea Arts Centre and, 10 years ago, to Leeds as founding artistic director of the WYP, the closest she has got thus far to a national theatre is directing the National Theatre of Brent.

Singin' in the Rain, the 1952 MGM classic which tells of the technological upheaval when the silent movie gave way to the talkie, was an astute way of making a splash at the turn of the millennium. "I was looking for an exact metaphor for a place when an industry changed. Theatre is changing as an industry, and has been quite intimidated by mixed media and performance art and the huge sweep of the Brit Art movement. It has reeled from not feeling as central to the agenda as it feels it used to be or ought to be. There is a vitality that theatre has when it's really modern and manages to hit an accessible moment. That was my hope with Singin' in the Rain and that was Gene Kelly's hope. He changed the way people thought about choreography."

The show successfully embodied her drive to lure a more disparate audience, and proved that she is adept at surrounding herself with talent - choreographer Stephen Mear and "waterist" Mario Borza (of whose skills Kelly seems immoderately fond, having used them in Macbeth and Dead-meat in Leeds, Othello in Washington and The Elixir of Love at the Coliseum). The show has washed away the National's bad memories of a leaky water tank in Alan Ayckbourn's river comedy Way Upstream. "Raining indoors is stage magic, isn't it? Creating a major rainstorm on stage takes a lot of determination because you can't minimise it. If we hadn't proved that it could really work, I think the National would have been much charier about inviting us. The fact that it's been invited back to have the Christmas slot is very gratifying. There is stunning work being done in the regions. If it's not in London people assume there's a reason for it not being in London."

Kelly, who is from Liverpool, does not wish to be pigeonholed as a tubthumper for the provinces. "I'm not a professional regions person. But it is still legitimate for art of great quality to be available in London but not necessarily around the rest of the country. It hardens up a flabby attitude that somehow the nation is 20 years behind out-side the M25."

Would she apply for a job inside the M25, at theatrical HQ? "I think that the people who are involved in subsidised theatre would feel committed to trying to make sure that our National Theatre is thriving. I'd be surprised if any of us didn't feel that there was a duty at least to consider whether you might run it well."