The long-awaited reopening of the Citizens theatre in Glasgow will mark a turning point for Scottish drama in 2025, with new artistic leadership across venues, including the Hollywood star Alan Cumming at Pitlochry Festival theatre, and a renewed determination to champion work beyond London.
The Citizens will return to its historic Gorbals home after the first major refurbishment of the category B listed building since it began life as a working theatre in 1878.
After a seven-year hiatus, a new commission, Small Acts of Love, will premiere in September 2025. The collaboration between the playwright Frances Poet and composer Ricky Ross, the lead singer of the rock band Deacon Blue, examines the bonds of friendship forged between the people of Lockerbie and the American relatives after the Pan Am flight 103 bombing in December 1988.
The artistic director, Dominic Hill, said that despite delays and soaring costs, momentum was building towards the reopening, while incoming artistic directors at Pitlochry as well as Jemima Levick at Glasgow’s Tron and James Brining at Edinburgh’s Lyceum would usher in “a really exciting phase” in Scottish theatre.
Hill said that after a recent dinner for artistic directors from across the country, “there’s a real desire and ambition to get going and to create the best work that we can, and to make sure that Scottish work is seen as exciting as work in London”.
The Citizens Theatre Company made its home in the storied south Glasgow venue in 1945, with a manifesto to provide live theatre for city dwellers and to stage new Scottish and international drama. In its first 21 years the Citizens presented nearly 300 plays, including 72 British and world premieres.
It drew writing and acting talent from across the UK – Pierce Brosnan, Celia Imrie, Rupert Everett, Sophie Ward, Sam Heughan – and developed a reputation for groundbreaking stagings. But it also remained close to its community roots, offering discounts for striking trade unionists and subsidised pantomime tickets for local schoolchildren.
The reopening is expected to boost the once notorious Gorbals, which itself has undergone significant regeneration in recent years.
“We are a theatre in the middle of a community,” said Hill. “When we were designing the building, the whole raison d’être was to create a civic space that was a focal point for the community.”
An expanded courtyard foyer will welcome visitors to the new Citizens, while the venue’s original sandstone auditorium has been wrapped in a new three-storey building, which includes a 150-seater studio theatre and spaces for set building, costume making and rehearsing.
The impact of Brexit, the pandemic, then escalating inflation since the war in Ukraine, doubled the estimated £20m cost of the project, and despite support from the national lottery, Scottish government and Glasgow city council, by this summer there were dire warnings that the entire project was at imminent risk of liquidation.
The Scottish government stepped in with a further £8m but the theatre – which has raised 92% of the funding – still has £3.5m to find.
A fundraising campaign will launch soon, said Kate Denby, who joined as chief executive from Northern Stage in October. “I’m struck by the sense of personal ownership so many people have of that building. Now we’re asking the people of Glasgow to help us get over the line.”
Small Acts is in association with the National Theatre of Scotland, and Hill said one of the lasting results of the pandemic had been that the sector communicates better. “With co-production, there’s a financial need, but there’s also a will now, to share the work, to give work longer life, to work together.”
Denby said: “I don’t go a week without having proper conversations with people at other theatres across Scotland and the UK. A question we’re all looking at is: how can we work smarter? The financial challenges now are different from those 10 years ago, and it requires that constant renewal and thinking: what is the collaboration that’s needed now? And how can we adapt?”
While there was widespread relief at the £34m arts funding boost promised in the Scottish government’s recent draft budget, there is acknowledgment that limping from one funding settlement to another does not allow much scope for longer-term strategising, nor does it give new writers the security they need to thrive.
Susannah Armitage, a co-chair of the Federation of Scottish Theatre and a senior producer at Eden Court, Inverness, said she was hopeful about the coming year, after the funding announcement and reopening “with a new play that is large and ambitious in scale makes a really strong statement”.
