Herald on Sunday, Sunday National, 24th August 2025.
This weekend, the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow is reopening its doors after an astonishing seven years out of action. It wasn’t meant to take this long. It was back in June 2018 when the theatre first shut its doors for the £20 million redevelopment of the Gorbals site. Covid-19 intervened. Costs rose. Time wore on. A smattering of Citizens productions took place in other venues, but without its iconic home as a backdrop, living in borrowed spaces, working on a smaller scale – it was basically impossible to keep hold of the company’s identity and continuity.
The redevelopment plans for the Gorbals Street site were substantial and ambitious – throwing a physical capsule around the Citz’s historic auditorium and equipment, building up a new three-story building around the Victorian heart of the venue, extending the venue’s 150-seater studio space for smaller productions, and making the old building more accessible for new audiences.
The redevelopment has also reassembled statutes Robert Burns, William Shakespeare, and four of the Muses. All six will now stand on the Citizens’ new façade. My inner child was even more delighted to discover that golden elephants in the foyer have survived the renovations and have found pride of place on new plinths of their own, in “a powerful symbol of continuity, heritage, and transformation.” It is good that these old friends have survived. But the loss has been real. During the long years in which the Citizens been closed, a part of Glasgow’s civic life has been missing.
Celebrations to mark the reopening included a parade this Saturday, led by looming puppets representing Comedy and Tragedy, with opportunities over the next fortnight for the community to come in, feel out the new space, and find their old favourite seats.
I love the theatre – particularly of the big, grand proscenium arch kind – and the Citz played a critical role in nurturing this enthusiasm. My primary school in mid-Argyll had a grand total of around thirty-five children in it, give or take, with four or five kids in each year.
During the winter term in the 1990s, we used to make an annual pilgrimage to Glasgow. Lunch would be packed. We’d all hop in a bus, crawling up and over the Rest and Be Thankful – stopping off in some frozen gym hall to scoff the normally rather-squashed ham rolls and emptying our slightly battered Ribena cartons – before rocking up at the Citz for the matinee performance of whichever Christmas play they were staging that year. We were generally sat in the gods, I think – when you’re small, the action inevitably feels far off – but the productions were the stuff magic and imagination is spun from.
We carried the threads home with us afterwards. We might only have been a small band, but between the kinds and creatively-minded teachers, Achahoish Primary was a curiously theatrical wee school. Every year, we used to tread the boards in Ormsary Hall in some kind of dramatic production. My inaugural role, aged five or six, I think was a bat – directorial guidance for Tickell: only modest flapping is required – followed by a brief cameo at Cinders’ ball as the Lord Toffeenose accompanied by his wife the Lady Dosh.
I like to think we drew on our experience the local landowner and wife in developing our performances in these supporting performances. Later, I remember being presented with a chicken costume, perhaps around primary four, and bantaming around the stage with chickenly gusto to the strains of The Hen’s March to the Midden. Alas, footage of this definitive performance of a Scots Dumpy has not survived, except perhaps in the Kremlin archives.
We later did Rats – a musical take on the Pied Piper of Hamelin story – and what I guess must have been Nick Cornall’s twist on Little Red Riding Hood, including two wolves – one of whom was a misunderstood vegetarian whose reputation for carnivorous wrongdoing was seriously exaggerated.
All of which were powerfully creative things to be doing and painting and setting to music in a tiny cul de sac off a single track road in Kintyre. And in that childish, imaginative way, you transposed your little production with its watercoloured backdrops and homespun costumes into all the light and colour and presence we got to see on stage at the Citz.
In your mind, you were doing the same thing as the real actors, making the same worlds, and living imaginatively in them. Childhood inspiration and the wilful suspension of disbelief shrunk the distance between the heroism of the heroes we saw on the professional stage and the villainy of the villains in our own stories – squeaky, earnest, and ramshackle as our childhood productions must have been.
I know the institution has left its imprint on other people’s lives too. One of my old GCU colleagues – Dr Jo Buckle – used to tell hilarious (and I’m afraid, unprintable) stories about his time worker as a dresser behind the scenes at the venue. His other credits included a range of other Glaswegian forms of employment out of central casting, including tram conductor, potato peeler, and later when he found a set of tweeds which suited him – criminology lecturer with a speciality in deviance.
Looking forward, there are also interesting questions about what furrow the new Citizens decides to plough. In the PR bumph supporting the Homecoming events, the Citz say this is “more than a reopening” it is “a return to our roots, a tribute to our heritage, and the beginning of a bold new chapter.” For all the excitement of the venue reopening,
For their inaugural run of productions, its directors have decided to avoid anything which could be described as gratuitously crowd-pleasing, nostalgic, or traditionally Scottish – and I find myself wondering, why not? Excited as I am by the venue’s reopening, I can’t be alone in feeling rather less enthused and not a little confused by the choices the creative team have made about how they want to reintroduce this venerable institution to its old friends.
It’s inaugural show – Small Acts of Love – is produced in association with the National Theatre of Scotland, written by playwright Frances Poet, and “brought to life with original songs by Ricky Ross of Deacon Blue.” It focuses on the human aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing. This is a story which has followed me around since law school. The first ever lecture I sat in was Robert Black KC expatiating on why he believed the trial was a miscarriage of justice.
For the last half decade, the story has featured in my miscarriages of justice class, exploring the arguments that Abdulbasset Al Megrahi may have been wrongfully convicted. Affecting BBC Scotland documentaries and retrospectives have captured the many little humanities good folk in the village of Lockerbie did for families experiencing terrible losses after Pam Am flight fell out of the sky in December 1988, laundering clothes, collecting belongings, making sure these artefacts are least arrived home safely.
But as a first hook for a season in which a major civic institution hopes to reintroduce itself to its audience – the production strikes me as a strange and potentially difficult choice for the Citizens to have made. Recent experience of Sky Atlantic’s Lockerbie: A Search for Truth starring Colin Firth and the Netflix-BBC collaboration on The Bombing of Pan Am 103 does not suggest that another story about the human dimensions of the 1988 tragedy is likely to be a box office draw, even when paired with Ricky Ross’s tunes.
The balance of the Homecoming season feels equally fragmented and unfocused. Small Acts of Love will be followed by Tennessee Williams’ Glass Menagerie – brace yourself for problematic maternal figures and faded southern belles. A classic American play, but again – an odd choice for the second production after the better part of a decade offline. In the new year, things begin to get a bit more promising, with Waiting for Godot, Saint Joan, and new adaptation of Denise Mina’s novel The Long Drop about the life and crimes of Peter Manuel being timetabled for the early summer next year.
Throwing open its doors, I know the institution will benefit from lot of goodwill. Over the years, it has more than earned it. But I can’t have been alone, thumbing through the new Citizens programme after seven fallow years, struggling to spot the clear creative vision being brought to bear by the west coast of Scotland’s major producing theatre as it springs back to life.
Andrew Tickell 