Citizens Theatre

Dominic Hill was Artistic Director at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh for the last 3 years. Prior to the Traverse, he was Co-Artistic Director (with James Brining) at Dundee Rep Theatre, a post he held for 5 years from 2003. Before joining Dundee Rep, Dominic worked as a Freelance Director, Associate Director at Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, Assistant Director at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Assistant Director at Perth Theatre. He has received many accolades for his critically acclaimed productions, including numerous CATS Awards (Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland) for amongst others, The Dark Things (Best Production 2009/10); Peer Gynt (Best Director & Best Production 2007/08); and Scenes from an Execution (Best Director 2003/04). Hill took up post in October 2011.

Guy Hollands became Artistic Director of the Citizens Theatre in 2006, having previously been Artistic Director of TAG since 2004. After four successful years, Hollands is expected to assume a new role leading the Citizens Theatre company's creative learning portfolio in early 2011. Previous Citizens productions directed by Hollands include "Hamlet", "Waiting For Godot", "Othello", "Beauty and the Beast", "The Caretaker", "Nightingale and Chase", "The Fever" and "Ice Cream Dreams", a ground breaking work which used community actors, people in recovery and professional actors to explore Glasgow's history during the "Glasgow Ice Cream Wars". Hollands' work for children and families for TAG and on tour includes Yellow Moon, " A Taste of Honey", "King Lear", "Knives in Hens", Liar, Museum of Dreams, "Meep and Moop" and The Monster in the Hall.

Jeremy Raison was the Artistic Director of the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow from 2003 until August 2010. After seven successful years Raison directed his final production A Clockwork Orange, based on Anthony Burgess's novel in October 2010. Previous Citizens productions directed by Raison include Thérèse Raquin, Baby Doll, A Handful of Dust, Desire Under the Elms and Ghosts as well as Scottish classics The Bevellers, No Mean City and his own adaptation of The Sound of My Voice based on the novel by Ron Butlin. Raison's work for children and families in the Citizens includes The Borrowers, Charlotte's Web, James and the Giant Peach, Peter Pan, Cinderella and Wee Fairy Tales.

James Bridie, the main pseudonym used by Dr Osborne Henry Mavor, was a leading British playwright of international status, screenwriter and physician. During his medical career, his first play was produced in 1928 in Glasgow. He is a founding father of modern Scottish theatre, reflecting his creation of the Citizens Theatre, appointment as the first chairman of the Scottish committee of the Arts Council, and inaugurator of Scotland's first College of Drama in 1950, now part of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. He was instrumental in establishing the Edinburgh Festival.[20]

He studied medicine at the University of Glasgow, then served as a medical officer during World War I in France and Mesopotamia. He became a senior consulting physician at the Victoria Infirmary and Professor of Medicine at Anderson's College. With the success of his comedies in London, Bridie became a full-time writer in 1938. The Bridie Library in Glasgow University Union, an organisation of which he was president, is named after him. The Citizens became immensely popular and had full houses, including school audiences and touring to communities, and staged a wide selection of productions in its first 25 years.[2]

From inception, the Citizens Theatre company was a full-time professional company. The first managing director was novelist Guy McCrone assisted by his wife and soon after that the post was held by George Singleton of cinema fame. One of the first business managers was Winifred Savile formerly producer and manageress of Perth Theatre[21] which had been created by her father J.H. Savile. By coincidence, her uncle, H.Cecil Beryl was lessee of the Royal Princess's Theatre from 1879 to 1887.[22] The board of directors included R.W.Greig, chairman of the Scottish National Orchestra, Norman Duthie, chartered accountant, and Sir John Boyd, lawyer.[2]

Following upon the first year in Buchanan street, which washed its face financially and the second year there which made a small profit, the first year 1945/46 in the larger and more comfortable theatre on the south-side attracted all its Athenaeum customers and a further 5,000 new patrons. Playwrights in the Citizens in its first year were: JB Priestley, Robert McLellan, Paul Vincent Carroll, James Bridie, Patrick Griffin, John Wilson, JM Barrie, Peter Ustinov, Robert Kemp, Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham, Anna LLouise Romoff, Gordon Daviot, Robins Millar, Gordon Bottomley and Moray McLaren. Seven of the productions were premieres.[22]

Production and art directors from 1943 to 1964 include : Eric Capon, Jennifer Sounes, Edmund Bacley, Matthew Forsyth, John Casson, James Gibson, Kenneth Mackintosh, Denis Carey, Michael Finlayson, Sir Tyrone Guthrie, Peter Potter, Alastair Sim, Colin Chandler, Richard Mathews, Fulton Mackay, Peter Duguid, Iain Cuthbertson, Albert Finney, Piers Hagard and Eric Jones.[22]

In its first 21 years the Citizens presented nearly 300 plays, of which 72 were British or world premieres.[22]

In the 1960s Glasgow Corporation decided to plan the construction of a new Theatre and Concert Hall in the city centre.[22] This eventually emerged in the late 1980s as the Glasgow International Concert Hall, at the top of Buchanan Street, but without the envisaged theatre.[23] The Citizens remain in its Gorbals site.

During the period from the 1970s to the 1990s, the Citizens was associated with innovative play selections and stagings by Giles Havergal, Philip Prowse and Robert David MacDonald. The three were responsible for the Citizens Theatre being again recognised as one of the leading theatres in Britain. Havergal and Prowse came from the Watford Palace Theatre in 1969. By 1971 Robert David MacDonald completed the triumvirate. Their internationalist approach was some distance from the original vision of a national theatre but did meet the access aspirations of the 1909 manifesto, not least in a commitment to low pricing.

Giles Havergal was Director of Watford Palace Theatre (1965–69) and director of the Citizens Theatre from 1969 to 2003. He directed over 80 plays in Glasgow including works by Shakespeare and Bertolt Brecht. He has also directed over 20 children and family Christmas productions. Havergal's production of Travels with My Aunt adapted from the Graham Greene novel of the same title, was first presented in Glasgow in 1989 and then played in the West End where it won a Laurence Olivier Award in 1993, and off Broadway in 1995. His production of his and Robert David Macdonald's adaptation of Death in Venice by Thomas Mann was first presented in Glasgow in 2000. It played at the Manhattan Ensemble Theatre, New York in 2002.

Philip Prowse was trained at the Slade School of Art and since 1970 was a Co-Director of the Citizens Company with Havergal and Robert David MacDonald. In 2003 both Havergal and MacDonald stepped down from their posts as directors of the company. Prowse however, continued his role as artistic collaborator with newly appointed Artistic Director, Jeremy Raison, until 2004. He directed and designed over 70 plays with the Citizens Theatre and has worked throughout the world designing and directing for opera, ballet and drama.

Robert David MacDonald became a Co-Director of the Citizens Company with Havergal and Philip Prowse in 1971 and retired in June 2003. In that time he wrote and adapted fourteen plays for the company: Dracula (1972); Camille (1974); De Sade Show (1975); Chinchilla (1977); No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1978); Summit Conference (1978); A Waste of Time (1980); Don Juan (1980); Webster (1983); Anna Karenina (1987); Conundrum (1992); In Quest of Conscience (1994); Persons Unknown (1995); The Ice House (1998), Britannicus (2002), Cheri (2003) and Snow White (2003). As an actor with the Citizens Company he played leading roles in more than twenty productions. He translated over sixty plays and operas from ten languages and as a director with the company he directed fifty productions including ten British or world premieres. Robert David MacDonald died in 2004.

During the 1970s the Citizens started to attract controversy with its productions and advertising.

The "Shakespeare in Drag" Poster which caused much controversy in 1975

In December 1970 city councillors called for an end to the GB£12,000 annual grant the Glasgow Corporation gave to the theatre after it was announced that anyone presenting a trade union card on 8 December would be granted free entry to the theatre. The Evening Times reported "The free tickets were suggested as a gesture of the actors' solidarity with the trade unionists' strike protest against the Industrial Relations Bill" (Evening Times, 7 December 1970). This was the first of many altercations between the theatre and the city council throughout the decade.

Earlier in the autumn season of 1970 a controversial new staging of Hamlet caused outrage in the press for the nudity and alternative acting styles of the company. The Scotsman headline reported "Hamlet Depicted As A Gibbering Oaf" (7 September 1970) but the public flocked to the production and the theatre discovered an all new audience. Cordelia Oliver, a longterm supporter of the Citizens in her reviews, noted in The Guardian "Schoolchildren en masse rarely sit "Hamlet" out in silence, nor are they often roused to cheering as they did at the end last Friday. If Havergal has set his sights on a predominately youthful audience for the Citizens this reception suggest he may not be so wide off the mark" (10 September 1970).

In 1975 a flier advertising the spring season was condemned by Labour councillor Laurence McGarry for its depiction of "Shakespeare, in drag with large cleavage, painted lips, corsets, suspenders and hand on hip". The councilor felt the theatre was guilty of "playing to an intellectual minority rather than the great mass of the public".

In 1977 the Lord Provost Mr Peter McCann called for the sacking of theatre bosses after a performance of Dracula which featured nude scenes he described as "kinky claptrap appealing only to mentally ill weirdos" (Sunday Express, 13 March 1977). The Provost's calls were not supported by his councillors and his attempts to gain city council control of programming at the Citizens failed. The entire run of Dracula at the Citizens was a sell-out.

Throughout its later existence the Citizens has been both criticised and acclaimed for its insistence on producing works which are not specifically populist, although heavily subsidised from public funds. While many have claimed that a citizens' theatre should deliberately appeal to a mass audience the theatre has a history of experimental works which have gained notice despite rather than because of their subject matter.

Following a fire, an order was made with little warning for the destruction of the Palace Bingo Hall (née Theatre) in 1977. Staff of the Citizens arranged a stay of execution to rescue the best of the Victorian fittings, including the six statues which stood atop the columns.[24] Following these works, almost the entire tenement block which had sat in front of the auditorium was razed, leaving the Citizens' foyer as the only remaining piece[25] In an article for the Guardian newspaper, Bunny Christie described the theatre in this period as "[sitting] on its own, surrounded by potholes and puddles, everything else seemed to have been pulled down." [26]

This state of affairs lasted until 1988, when the remaining foyer and bars were torn down as part of a new development on Gorbals Street by Strathclyde Regional Council, which included a new foyer and bars for the theatre. During the reconstruction, a limited "in the round" theatre operated on the stage behind the safety curtain, accessed via a temporary foyer located at an emergency exit[27] with a capacity of 250.[28] The main theatre was reopened for the Christmas show, in slightly makeshift fashion due to uncompleted works,[29] as it had been identified as essential to the Company's finances.[30]

The new foyer, fronted in glass and yellow brick, opened in 1989 and lasted until its demolition, which began in September 2019.[31] Further works throughout the 1990s included the creation of two studio theatres in 1991-92;[32] office space on the north side in 1996-1998 which also included a new rehearsal room, scene dock, front-of house offices and lift access with National Lottery funding [33][34]

As part of the 2019-onward works, delayed somewhat by the COVID-19 pandemic,[35] the south and west of the building, including the 1989 foyer,[36] were demolished completely with the intention to rebuild both front and back-of-house facilities.[37] During these works, the theatre closed completely, with shows from the Company taking place at Tramway[38] and projects at Scotland Street School Museum[39] (both COVID-19 restrictions permitting) in the meantime.

Inside the Citizens foyer from 1977 were four elephant statues and four Nautch girls' statues, all in the baroque Anglo-Indian style, a reminder of the re-design of the adjacent Palace Theatre in 1907 by Bertie Crewe. The remaining two elephants and two more Nautch girls (or goddesses) can now be found in the Theatre Museum in London.

The foyer also features statues representing William Shakespeare, Robert Burns and four muses, music, dance, tragedy and comedy, which were originally placed on the roof of the Royal Princess's Theatre and are the work of Victorian Glasgow sculptor John Mossman. The four muses are Music (Euterpe), Comedy (Thalia), Tragedy (Melpomene) and Dance (Terpsichore).[40]

The six pillars on which they sat were once the front of the Union Bank on Ingram Street. The statues were brought down from the building after nearly a hundred years on 12 July 1977 in order to protect them from demolition work taking place at nearby Gorbals Cross. The six statues will re-emerge on the roofline of the theatre in 2020.[7]

Over time, many patrons and staff members have reported sightings of ghosts. One long term staff member, trapped in the upper circle during a blackout, was led to safety by the distinctive outline of a monk. Customers seated in the dress circle during shows in the 1970s often inquired about the costumed "actor" who sat boldly on the balcony and stared back at them. Current staff members have caught glimpses of a "white lady" dressed in Victorian costume and flitting (moving) from the dress circle bar towards the circle studio dressing rooms. Backstage dressing room 7 is thought to be haunted by some of its past inhabitants and the upper circle has occasional visits from a strawberry seller girl, one of the most sighted of the Citizens ghosts.

• James Bridie and His Theatre, by Winifred Bannister (Savile), published 1955.
• The Citizens Theatre 21st Anniversary Conspectus, published 1964.
• The Citizens Theatre to the Present Day, by Tony Paterson, published 1970.
• Dr Mavor and Mr Bridie, by his son Dr Ronald Mavor, published in 1988.
• Magic in the Gorbals, A Personal Record of the Citizen's Theatre, by Cordelia Oliver, published 1999.