How Scotland's theatre found its place on the European stage

The Citz (as the Gorbals theatre was, and still is, affectionately known) was in the early stages of a revolutionary artistic transformation. A radical, young Scot by the name of Giles Havergal had taken the directorial reins the previous year, and the experimental, avant-garde work he was presenting was ruffling feathers.

Artaud’s 1935 drama The Cenci was based upon Shelley’s retelling of the true story of a 16th-century Italian nobleman who was murdered by the family he had tyrannised over.

The Herald’s critic, Christopher Small, described the defiantly non-naturalistic, modernist production (which was directed by Havergal’s ally Robert Walker) as anti-theatrical and proof of Havergal’s masochistic desire to trash the good name of the Citizens Theatre. There was indignation from sections of the audience, too. One patron complained to the theatre that a jock-strapped actor had suffered a wardrobe malfunction and that, consequently, “my wife glimpsed a testicle!”

Worse was to come for Havergal. In September of 1970, he directed an audacious, all-male production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (designed by his long-time collaborator Philip Prowse and featuring a young David Hayman in the title role). No sooner had it taken to the stage than the brickbats began to fly.

David Hayman in Hamlet at The Citizens, 1970

Writing on the front page of The Scotsman, theatre critic Allen Wright denounced the production as a “shameful” staging which would give “many young people a warped impression of” the Bard of Stratford’s great opus.

The Herald deplored an “anti-Hamlet”. Mamie Crichton of the Scottish Daily Express went further, describing the production as a kind of theatrical hara-kiri, and suggesting that Havergal had a “death-wish”.

It was only one year into his directorship and already the bold Havergal’s position seemed to be hanging by a thread. “There definitely was a move to get me out”, he told me in 2012. “[Herald critic] Christopher Small said that it was time that the problem at the Citz was dealt with completely, or words to that effect...

“I think the board [of the Citz] were very rattled. I think they thought we would lose our grant. It’s funny looking back on it, but it was a dangerous time.”

HAVERGAL can laugh now about how close he came to getting his jotters in 1970, and with good reason. Having dodged a P45 so early in his time at the Citz, he (alongside Prowse and Robert David MacDonald, the extraordinary translator, writer and director who completed the theatre’s famous “triumvirate” in 1971) went on to run Glasgow’s leading repertory theatre until 2003.

Giles Havergal in 1969

The resolution of the Citizens’ board in 1970 to hold its nerve and stand by the appointment of Havergal was surely one of the most important decisions ever taken in the history of Scottish theatre. Without it we would have lost a dynamic force in our culture which played the crucial leading role in embedding European modernist aesthetics within live drama in Scotland.

Our theatre culture had, belatedly, started to flirt with European modernism with the inauguration of the Edinburgh International Festival and Fringe in 1947, and the birth of the Traverse Theatre Club in Edinburgh in 1963.

However, it is not until Havergal arrived at the Citz in 1969 that a major repertory theatre, sitting at the heart of Scottish theatre culture, found itself in the hands of someone with a fearless passion for the avant-garde. The significance of this for our theatre in the half-century that followed should not be underestimated. More than anyone else, the Citz triumvirate gave theatremakers in Scotland the confidence to raise their eyes from the often dry naturalism that predominated in the theatre cultures of Britain and take inspiration from continental Europe.

Writing in his excellent book, The Citz: 21 Years Of The Glasgow Citizens Theatre, leading English theatre critic Michael Coveney describes the Havergal Citizens as having created: “A theatre of visual delight and European orientation which [bore] no relationship whatsoever to the great upheavals in British theatre since the mid-1950s”, a theatre which “renounced Scottishness, but renounced Englishness, too”.

For their part, the triumvirate were consciously aware that they were trying to do something that was distinctively European, and at odds with the aesthetics of London-dominated British theatre.

“In terms of the ‘Europeanness’ of the work, Philip [Prowse] was always very determined that we wouldn’t become another ‘English company’”, says Havergal.

“We were up in Glasgow (which was actually home to me, as it turned out, but not for them [Prowse and MacDonald]), and we actually wanted to take advantage of being 400 miles away from London, and create our own style of theatre.

‘‘I always summed it up by saying we didn’t care what the Royal Shakespeare Company was doing. We weren’t influenced by that. Whereas, I think, if you were in an English theatre at that time, you would have to have been. We simply weren’t connected to that whole organisation that was ‘English theatre’.”

The problem was, in their taste for decadent visual beauty and audacious sexual expression, the directors were also not connected with the prevailing mores of Glasgow and wider Scottish society. Looking back at the controversies of 1970, Havergal observes: “My sense of what happened at that Hamlet was that what we call ‘the Sixties’ came to Glasgow.

“I’d lived in Glasgow since 1953, because my father worked there. So I’d seen Glasgow, and I always say a bus queue in Glasgow in 1969 – or 1970, when the Hamlet was – looked very much like a bus queue of 10 years before.

The whole thing of wide trousers, long hair, pot smoking, ambisexuality and all that had simply not arrived.”

Arrive, with the appointments of Havergal, Prowse and MacDonald, it did. The survival and flourishing of their regime throughout the 1970s (when the Citz provided a fruitful contrast with the ceilidh theatre and socialist agitprop of John McGrath’s theatre company 7:84) was a beacon for those who wanted Scotland to make a belated entry into the ranks of modern European theatre. Gerry Mulgrew, who, along with Alison Peebles and Rob Pickavance, founded the path-breaking touring company Communicado in Edinburgh in 1983, remembers being inspired by the Citizens.

“It was a European theatre”, he says. “They were seen as vagabonds or gypsies, exotic people doing exotic things...

“I was always aware of them being interesting. They were in Glasgow, but they’d come from outer space. There was a sense that they could have been doing what they were doing anywhere.

“I wanted to do that. I wanted to do something that had Europeanness in it, but also to try and do it as a Scot.”

DOING European modernism as Scots was exactly what Communicado did. There was, for example, the premiere of Liz Lochhead’s proudly Scottish, starkly theatrical play Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off in 1987.

The following year, the company staged Blood Wedding by the outstanding Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca. They kept the play’s setting in the writer’s native Spain, but, unusually for a time when classics still tended to be performed in “received pronunciation”, they played it in Scottish accents.

Communicado’s work – whether it was their staging of South African playwright Athol Fugard’s play A Place With The Pigs (1994) or Tam o’ Shanter (2009), the company’s homage to Burns – was characterised by its respect for the aesthetic innovations of modern European theatre.

Like the Havergal Citz, their productions were memorable visually, with a wonderfully stylised form of physical performance and, often, a brilliant, live musicality.

As well as taking inspiration from the Citz, the shows owed a palpable debt to leading lights of the European avant-garde, such as Jerzy Grotowski (from Poland) and Jacques Lecoq (from France).

From there, Communicado appears to have been the inspiration, either directly or indirectly, for a number of fine Scottish, decidedly European and modernist touring companies, including Suspect Culture, Vanishing Point, Grid Iron, Wee Stories and Catherine Wheels.

The Citz embedded modernist aesthetics in Scottish theatre culture in the 1970s, and Communicado disseminated them in the 1980s.

However, it was not until the 1990s, and what I consider to be the “golden generation” of Scottish dramatists, that we see the emergence of genuinely European modernist playwrights.

It is no disrespect to the playwrights of the generation before these dramatists (excellent writers such as Liz Lochhead, John Byrne, Jo Clifford and Chris Hannan) to say that stage writers such as David Greig (The Cosmonaut’s Last Message To The Woman He Once Loved In The Former Soviet Union), Zinnie Harris (Further Than The Furthest Thing), David Harrower (Knives In Hens) and Anthony Neilson (The Wonderful World Of Dissocia, pictured below) took Scottish theatre to a new and, significantly, international level.

The same is true of the auteur theatre maker and designer Stewart Laing, who often works in partnership with playwright Pamela Carter, producing work such as the acclaimed Paul Bright’s Confessions Of A Justified Sinner.

Whereas their predecessors seemed to be writing largely, and perfectly reasonably, for Scottish, sometimes British, audiences, the 90s generation of playwrights have created dramas which, linguistically, stylistically and conceptually, translate throughout Europe and beyond.

On my own travels in Europe I have seen – to take two examples – Harrower’s Knives In Hens performed in Portuguese and Harris’s Further Than The Furthest Thing presented in Slovene.

Imaginative, non-naturalistic, poetic, metaphorical and utterly compelling, these plays (which are, for my money, two of the finest Scottish dramas ever written) have, alongside work by Greig, Neilson, Laing, Carter and others, played an important ambassadorial role for Scottish theatre across Europe and globally.

Greig, who, in addition to being one of Scotland’s most prolific and successful dramatists, is also artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, agrees that he and his fellow playwrights of the 90s generation are the beneficiaries of an aesthetic revolution that began back in 1969 with Havergal’s arrival at the Citz.

“I can’t think of any artistic director in Scotland who wouldn’t in some way want to emulate Giles [Havergal]”, he says.

Havergal is, Greig continues, “the originator of a tradition... I could argue all sorts of different reasons why it happened in 1969, but maybe we were just bloody lucky that he was available at the time.”