It’s hard to see the acquisition of Live Nation’s theatres by the Ambassador Theatre Group as anything other than good news, especially as some less than lovely foreign speculators were reportedly hovering with tempting bids to make.

This isn’t just British chauvinism: the prospective American and European theatre-owners would have been unlikely to freshen the West End or regions. ATG and its subsidary, Sonia Friedman productions, stages about 30 plays and musicals a year, finances others, and sends up-market tours across the country.

Is the group too powerful? Well, it owns the Donmar Warehouse and recently transformed the grotty old Whitehall Theatre into the Trafalgar Studios and, among other things, brought John Simm to play a mentally damanged loner in Simon Bent’s Elling there.

It has given the regions Glyndebourne Opera, work by Matthew Bourne, Sadler’s Wells’s revival of West Side Story and, complete with Ken Stott, a stunning production of Arthur Miller’s View from the Bridge.

It took John Doyle’s hugely inventive revival of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd into the West End and on to victory at the Tony Awards in New York, the same city where ATG recently produced a revival of Ionesco’s Exit the King, with Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon.

The group’s expanded portfolio ranges from vast commercial city theatres in Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham to a converted fire station in Oxford. It must fill the 3,000 seats of the Edinburgh Playhouse, as well as the few dozen of the more intimate Trafalgar Studio.

That’s the challenge for Howard Panter and Rosemary Squire — who have seen ATG grow from nothing into the most important theatre group in the nation — have wisely or unwisely set themselves.

But their record suggests that they are not likely to achieve success by dumbing down. Trevor Nunn’s recent revival of Porgy and Bess did very nicely at one of ATG’s theatres, the Savoy. Now that could be followed by a run at Manchester’s Palace or Liverpool’s Empire - or even Edinburgh’s cavernous Playhouse.

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