All the city's a stage

He wanted her to come out to Stanmer House, the great Georgian manor at Stanmer Park, Falmer, which at that time had stood unused for nearly a quarter of a century.

He wanted, he said, to tell her about an idea he had for a new piece. McMorrow, whose job includes organising the Festival's theatre programme, had already used up her budget for the following May. But she was intrigued enough to make the trip.

"It was freezing cold when I arrived, and there was this mist shrouding the park," she recalls. "Then this woman called Anne, who used to hold the keys to the house, came walking through the churchyard looking completely insane, with this huge Irish wolfhound and a mad flock of grey hair. Already I was getting tingles up my spine."

Standing amid the faded grandeur of Stanmer House's lobby, Sharp unveiled his proposal for a piece based on the Orpheus myth which would echo through the manor's silent network of hallways and stairwells, eventually drawing its audience, as Eurydice was taken down to Hades, into the dark bowels of its long-deserted basement.

With people wandering freely through the production in groups of three and piecing the narrative together like a jigsaw, dreamthinkspeak's Don't Look Back became one of the hits of the 2003 Brighton Festival.

It also turned McMorrow on to the possibilities of site-specific work. And while Stanmer House is now a venue for conferences and weddings, the placing of theatrical performances in unconventional local environments has become a defining feature of her six-year Brighton Festival tenure.

In 2004, for instance, Semper Fi's Ladies and Gents saw the audience divided between the grime-streaked urinals and dingy cubicles of the Colonnade toilets in Marine Parade.

Backed into dark corners, eyeballed by the Irish actors and forced to inhale the "venue's" homegrown scent, this was a macabre mystery we experienced far too closely for comfort.

The following year dreamthinkspeak returned with Underground, a promenade piece which recreated the feverish atmosphere of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment by scattering characters and scenes throughout the corridors, stairwells and backrooms of the labyrinthine Theatre Royal Brighton.

Operating as a sort of 3D version of a choose-your-own-adventure book, it allowed the audience to find their own way through the maze of performance spaces, rifling through notebooks and police reports for clues. The lucky few who found the bar in the orchestra pit were even treated to a complimentary spread of rye bread, gherkins and, naturally, vodka.

We've also seen the Ocean Hotel in Saltdean strewn with the debris of a dirty weekend (2005's Dirty Wonderland), the fairy light-decked cottages of Stanmer Village turned into a sort of living advent calendar (2006's Souterrain), and a coproduction with Brighton's Prodigal Theatre, Ten Thousand Several Doors, which transported the action of Webster's The Duchess Of Malfi from Renaissance Italy to Fifties Brighton.

A highlight of the 2006 programme, it saw a gang of Brighton Rock-esque heavies field the Nightingale Theatre audience between scenes, including a sinister cabaret staged in the Grand Central pub downstairs and a harrowing chase across the station courtyard below which we watched from the theatre's normally blacked-out windows.

The trend for site-specific theatre shows no sign of abating this year, with the 2007 Brighton Festival programme boasting four shows billed as sitespecific pieces.

Sitting in the Brighton Festival offices in North Street, a friendly, higgledypiggledy place where the corridors are lined with cardboard boxes full of accounts and the desks piled high with CDs and photos, McMorrow tells me there are several reasons for this.

"I do have a very populist approach to programming," she says, "and the main thing with site-specific work for me is bringing theatre to an audience who wouldn't normally set foot in a theatre.

When I first came to the job there were a lot of elitist tags connected with the Festival and we've worked incredibly hard to make the city feel like they own the Festival, which I think they do.

"I've had huge numbers of letters and emails from people about these site-specific pieces saying, It was a lifechanging experience, I'd never engaged with work in that way.' At the theatre you're too often sat in a comfy seat, completely disassociated from what's happening on stage.

"Another reason I started doing them was a lack of suitable venues in the city. Because it's three weeks, we often struggled for space."

Then, of course, there's the additional level of impact you glean from setting a piece of theatre in a place that has its own atmosphere, architectural features and human echoes, often with a particular resonance for the local community.

This year a free promenade performance, PlayRec, will see French company KompleX KapharnauM create a piece at Trafalgar Street Arches, once the site of the Isetta Bubble Car Factory, which will be based on the memories of former workers.

"They identify a space that has a powerful history in terms of the people who lived and worked there, then use their stories to develop the piece so it re-engages with the history of the space," explains McMorrow. "Their work is very audio visual. The building is listed so we're having real problems at the moment trying to get permission to wallpaper the sides."

Meanwhile shows such as Don't Look Back and Dirty Wonderland allowed us a last nose around two stunning chunks of local history.

Just two months before its art deco bedrooms and ballrooms were converted into flats, Frantic Assembly set a promenade piece in Saltdean's Ocean Hotel which cheekily cast its audience as prospective buyers. Here we chased a rattling trolley through darkened corridors to arrive at interconnected tableaux.

In one room the 30-strong group crammed around a bed on which a basque-clad dominatrix aggressively demanded to know what we were looking at. Down in the kitchens, we followed the bloody remnants of some unseen slaughter to a place where a fake forest had sprouted from carpet to ceiling and the air filled with the smell of bark. Passing back through the foyer, we found a waiter who had hung himself from the spiral stair.

"I know I'll never be involved in anything quite like Dirty Wonderland again," says McMorrow of this piece of Festival history. "Frantic Assembly approached me in 2005 and the initial idea was to put the show into a mid-sized bed and breakfast. Then one day a woman from the office told me she'd worked at the Ocean Hotel when it was a Butlins, and that we should check it out. It was just the most extraordinary place. Then we found out it was closing.

The company who bought it weren't starting work 'til July so they said we could use it.

"We're doing a new show with Frantic Assembly next year but I can't persuade them to do another site-specific piece.

It was the first they'd ever done and because it was such a success they're terrified to try and follow it."

A former special needs teacher who jokes that her time spent working with autistic people may well have assisted in her latter day dealings with artists, McMorrow and her husband moved to Brighton eight years ago, where they have since had two children. She has always loved the arts, and while teaching in London in the early Eighties she ran a small venue above a pub in her spare time, programming emerging names such as Julian Clary and an early version of Stomp in which Luke Cresswell and a guy called Tintin "came on stage covered in metal and beat seven bells out of each other".

Full-time positions as a producer for Radio 4 and house manager of the newly reopened Hackney Empire followed, before she spotted the ad for Brighton Festival Producer in 2001, and decided it was her "dream job".

"I'm quite passionate about the role of the producer," says McMorrow, whose job is to help bring artists' ideas to fruition, using all the financial, creative and social nous that entails. "Producers are a very particular type of person, and hard to find. It's a very creative role, but also hugely practical, and you get used to working with the sometimes very large egos and emotional frailty that comes with the arts. You also have to be brave and able to take risks, because creating new work is a risky business."

The risks that have failed to pay off in recent years (and in McMorrow's opinion, there are few), include Told By An Idiot's The Evocation Of Papa Mas from last year's programme ("I had been to see lots of rehearsals and got very excited - the run sold out but they just didn't come up with the goods") and The Story Of Ronald The Clown From McDonalds, from 2005, in which Spain's La Carniceria Teatro littered the Gardner Arts stage with milk, wine, sausages and plastic faeces while administering Coke enemas and writhing about in their pants.

"I loved that piece of work," recalls McMorrow of this visceral assault against mass consumption. "The original idea was to put it into the old Fruit and Veg market in Circus Street but there were problems with leaks and asbestos in the roof. So I had to decide whether to put it into a conventional space, and I should've said, No, it's not going to work. But I'd gone so far down the line and the company were so excited about coming over. The first night I remember standing at the back of the Gardner, my eyes peering over the stairs into the auditorium, thinking, Oh God, what are they going to make of it'?"

In fact, the biggest financial risks are the site-specific pieces, which rarely make any money due to the reduced audience capacity and the logistics of essentially setting up a theatre - with its licences, health and safety provisions, lighting rigs and sound equipment - entirely from scratch. The edgier the concept, the harder too it is to attract sponsorship.

Unbelievably, for instance, Dirty Wonderland got no sponsors.

"All the sponsors wanted tickets themselves," McMorrow laughs, "but none of them were prepared to put their brand against the publicity image which featured a bare botty."

One show from this year's programme which seems designed to push many of the same buttons as Dirty Wonderland is The Maids. It will take place at the Old Ship Hotel and is pitched as a neat match between Jean Genet's infamous absurdist play and that most iconic of Brighton locations: an upstairs room in a seafront hotel. A world premiere of a new translation by Neil Bartlett, it has been commissioned by the Festival.

The audience will gather in the foyer of Brighton's oldest hotel before climbing a winding stair to the maid's living quarters, eventually ending up in a large disused space above the hotel garage, where the action will take place with the audience seated along one side.

"It's a very dark tale based on a truelife murder which happened in the Thirties in France," says McMorrow.

"The Papin sisters were maids in this large household, who used to role-play how they were going to murder their mistress. They would swap parts in order to work out how best to do it. Neil, in the staging of it, wanted the audience to feel very close to the action and inside the heads of the sisters.

"It's quite an edgy piece so we want the audience to feel the uncertainty. The only set is the bed - a lot of stuff happens on the bed."

Setting aside C-90, Daniel Kitson's Fringe First winning one-man show which has been "specially reconceived"

for the Brighton Festival, the other big site-specific piece this year is The New World Order.

A series of Pinter shorts, it's set in the lofty council chambers and subterranean police cells of Brighton Town Hall.

McMorrow has helped to develop the show since Brighton actors Richard Hahlo and Jem Wall (The Boy's Own Story) approached her two years back.

Billed impressively as "Reclaiming Pinter from the glitz of the West End and taking him back to his muscular roots", The New World Order will reach its climax in the police cells, which have attracted hundreds of tourists since they were opened to the public last year.

"There's a lot about displacement, interrogation, loss of free speech," says McMorrow of the five Pinter shorts. "I visited the police cells a while back and when you walk into one of these cells and shut the door, there's such an immediate sense of confinement. I thought, What would it be like for an audience to be shut in here with a scene happening right in front of them?'"

Of course the fact that this is the only police station in the UK where the chief constable was murdered in his own office also adds a certain frisson.

"In the late 1800s a man was arrested in St James's Street for stealing a carpet,"

says McMorrow. "He was brought down to the police cells and while the chief constable was questioning him in his office, the thief picked up a poker from the fireplace and whacked him over the head with it. So you're standing in this space, looking at that fireplace, thinking, Oh my God, it actually happened here!' There's such an extraordinary resonance."

The other aspect distinguishing The New World Order is that it is the only homegrown production in this year's Brighton Festival theatre programme, a fact which has led to renewed accusations that the Festival does not do enough to support and nurture local talent.

McMorrow is fond of saying "the unique selling point of the Festival is that it happens in Brighton", and talks about wanting to "harness the energy" of a city "just crawling with creative people".

So why, this year, are we seeing local companies such as Prodigal Theatre, with whom the Festival co-produced last year's sell-out Ten Thousand Several Doors, step from the main programme into the Fringe?

"Well I wouldn't say that nurturing local talent is primarily our role," she says. "That's not what we're funded to do. I do have an ambition to move more towards being a producing festival. I'm trying to develop the production skills of the team, and I'm negotiating with the Arts Council for more money. But bringing in existent work is always going to be cheaper.

"I have worked on a range of shows over the years with Brighton-based artists and companies. Neil Bartlett is a Brighton-based director with a fantastic international reputation which is why I approached him originally. I'm talking to two local companies for 2008 and another for 2009. But it's not just a theatre festival and I can't say yes to everything. I hope people understand that, because I've made a huge effort to make artists feel there is a window of opportunity there."

Adding credence to these assertions is the fact that, when conversation later turns to her own future, McMorrow talks about wanting to go back to "working more closely with a smaller number of companies, developing work".

"I absolutely will do 2008," she says, "but I think at that point I will be seriously thinking about moving on. I want to keep the producer role, but the thing with the Festival is there are 200 events in a very short period of time. It is a bit of a conveyer belt."

Before then, however, McMorrow has plenty more site-specific treats up her sleeve. She's hoping to team up with Liverpool, the European Capital Of Culture 2008, for a promenade piece called Hen and Stag which, in the Brighton version, would conclude in a night club in West Street. She's sizing up Sussex Square and Queen's Park for a show for next year's programme which "has to be set in a large garden", and talking to Brighton General Hospital and the Royal Alexandra on behalf of multimedia company Punch Drunk, who want a hospital for 2009. Apparently Daniel Kitson's got a fantastic idea for another site-specific work conceived in seven chapters, the only problem being that he wants each part to happen on a different day and in a different location.

And then there's Small Metal Objects, a piece by the Australian company Back to Back, in which the four performers wear mics, the audience wear headphones, and the action plays out amongst a crowd of ordinary people going about their business. It premiered at Sydney Harbour and will be performed at Paddington Station in association with the Barbican this autumn. McMorrow is considering Brighton Station, Churchill Square, the Palace Pier But the site-specific piece about which she says least and conveys the most excitement will take place somewhere much closer to home. Destined for 2009, it will see the Brighton Festival once more team up with the inspirational dreamthinkspeak.

"Let's just say," says McMorrow with a familiar twinkle in her eye, "that I've always had a desire to put a piece of theatre in the round in the Dome Concert Hall. I have to see about pulling out some seats."