Small Acts of Love: the 'ambitious' new show reopening the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow
This autumn, the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow will reopen after a seven-year refurbishment programme with a production of Ricky Ross and Frances Poet’s Lockerbie bombing drama Small Acts of Love. Joyce McMillan reports
First preview Tuesday 9 September, gala opening Friday 12th; and with a mighty swirl of Gorbals glamour, Glasgow’s beloved Citizens’ Theatre will be open again for business, after a £40 million rebuilding programme that was originally billed to take three years, but that - thanks to lockdown, among many other delays - has taken more than seven years, since May 2018.
The result, though, is simply breathtaking. The Citizens’ much-loved Victorian auditorium, first opened in 1878, remains as it always was, glowing in red plush and superb gold plasterwork, and with its dizzyingly steep balcony tier now gorgeously refurbished for the 21st century. All around it, though - and designed to reveal and celebrate the very bones of the original Citizens’ building - is a fabulous new theatre building for Glasgow, still featuring some of the old backstage spaces, but also offering a soaring new foyer and cafe area opening straight onto Gorbals Street.
There are also - beyond the foyer - a range of impressive new facilities, from a brand new studio theatre and community company space to new or beautifully refurbished dressing rooms, rehearsal spaces, workshops and offices, and a magical glass-walled corridor that runs through the building, offering the public a view of everything from the backstage scene dock to the ancient machinery still in place under the stage.
“It’s a wonderful moment,” says the Citizens’ artistic director Dominic Hill, reflecting on the company’s final rush to reopen, in just six weeks time. “It feels big, and it feels national in its significance. The new building is just so exciting and inspiring; and what I love is the way it somehow holds the whole history of the Citizens’, while also enabling us to look forward. In the time the theatre has been closed, a whole new community has grown up around it - a new Gorbals, with new people moving in; and we really want to be a vital part of that life of the community, a big building full of activity people can join in with, with a cafe that’s open all day, and a real sense of open access for everyone.
“An in terms of the work on stage - well, you can see from our opening season that we want to present both classics and new work, perhaps more new work than in the past. We want to be telling stories about and from Scotland as it is today, as well as reinterpreting classics for our time; and that’s why it just felt so right to reopen with a brand new show, a big, ambitious show that links Scotland to some of the key issues of our time.”
The show in question is Small Acts of Love, a new piece of music theatre about the aftermath of the Lockerbie bombing of 1988, co-written by Glasgow-based playwright Frances Poet and Ricky Ross of Deacon Blue, who is delighted to be involved in the reopening of the theatre. “I came to Glasgow as a student in the early 1980’s,” says Ross, “and I went to see everything at the Citizens’. And it just changed me, as it changed many people in my generation - the idea that Glasgow could have this fabulous theatre that was challenging and exciting audiences all over Europe - it was just transformative.
“So I’ve always loved the place; and when Dominic suggested this project back in 2020, and put me in touch with Frances Poet who had already been working on the Lockerbie story, it just seemed absolutely right. The story of what happened in Lockerbie after the bombing is just so much a story about community; and that’s something I think theatre, particularly music theatre, can just capture brilliantly. At first, back in lockdown, it was just Frances doing the research and writing the script, and me writing the songs, both music and lyrics.
“But as the lyrics began to emerge, I would share them with Frances, and she would begin to work them into the text; and I really hope we’ve created something that gets to the heart of that experience, of how a community - and the American families they came to know so well - can survive such a thing, and begin to live on.”
After Small Acts Of Love, the Citizens’ autumn main stage season will also included a full-scale production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie - co-produced with the Lyceum and Dundee Rep - and a first chance for Glasgow to see local playwright Douglas Maxwell’s award-winning 2024 play So Young. And at Christmas, the theatre will present both Barrowland Ballet’s beautiful show The Gift, and - on the main stage - a brand new version of Beauty And The Beast by Lewis Hetherington, co-directed by Dominic Hill with brilliant young director Joanna Bowman.
“And after Christmas,” adds Dominic Hill, “we’re really looking forward to shows like Lynn Nottage’s terrific American rust-belt play Sweat, Stewart Laing’s take on Saint Joan, and a stage adaptation of Denise Mina’s brilliant Glasgow novel The Long Drop, about the Peter Manuel trial.
“One show I’m particularly pleased about, though, is the first play in our studio, the Citizens’ young company show Close. On one hand it tells the story of the Close Theatre, the Citizens’ little theatre club and studio that brought a whole new strand of radical work to Glasgow audiences in the 1960s and 70s. Yet on the other, it also looks forward, and reflects on how that history can help shape our work today, and into the future. And I think in that sense, our young company is really expressing everything we want to say about this theatre, as we reopen; how much we value the Citizens’ amazing past, and how excited we are that we can now take that inspiration forward, into the future.”
Small Acts Of Love is at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, from 12 September until 4 October, with previews from 9-11 September, see www.citz.co.uk/whats-on
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