Citizens Theatre Research Articles

The Theatricality of Grief

Roland Barthes’s influential book on photography Camera Lucida has been discussed by Michael Fried as an exercise in ‘antitheatrical critical thought’, for its celebration of the accidental, non-intentional, detail and the naïve non-performance of the photographed subject (see Fried 2008). However, in Barthes’s comparison between photography and theatre in the book he evokes Samuel Weber’s definition of theatricality as an interruption of the Aristotelean movement toward a ‘meaningful goal’ (Weber 2004: 46). Barthes explores the photograph’s ‘foreclosure of the Tragic’ that ‘excludes all purification, all catharsis’, writing that nothing in the photograph ‘can transform my grief into mourning’ (Barthes 1993: 90). In these remarks Barthes sets up a distinction between the self-affirming cultural practice of mourning and the more painful, ongoing affective realm of grief.In 2017 I staged After Camera Lucida, a practice-as-research performance at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow that responded to the concepts, methods and form of Barthes’s book through my own personal experience of losing my mother when I was 14. This article critically reflects on After Camera Lucida, contextualising the performance through Barthes’s ideas, Weber’s concept of theatricality and recent scholarly work between theatre studies, visual studies and film. The article explores the ways that After Camera Lucida practised the suspension of mourning and catharsis as a particularly theatrical a/effect and how the slowing down of movement and time in the work explored a radical theatricality circulating between bodies, spaces and images.The article is punctuated by photographic documentation of the performance from Glasgow-based artist Julia-Kristina Bauer.

Creating a new Scottish musical: Composing and staging The Choir – an interview with Ricky Ross and Dominic Hill

Abstract Ricky Ross is a Scottish singer-songwriter. He is lead singer of the band Deacon Blue, which he formed in Glasgow in 1985. He has also released six solo albums, and as a songwriter has written for artists including James Blunt, Jamie Cullum, Nanci Griffith, Ronan Keating, KT Tunstall and Will Young. The Citizens Theatre, known as ‘the Citz’, is the West of Scotland’s principal producing theatre and has produced a wide range of theatre productions over its 70-year history. Its Victorian building in the Gorbals, an area to the south of Glasgow, houses a 500-seat main auditorium and two studio spaces. Dominic Hill became Artistic Director of the Citizens Theatre in 2011, before which he was Artistic Director of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, and joint Artistic Director of Dundee Rep Theatre. He has directed productions extensively around the United Kingdom, including for the Royal Shakespeare Company and Scottish Opera. Ricky Ross’ original musical The Choir (book by Paul Higgins, lyrics by Higgins and Ross) was produced by the Citizens Theatre in partnership with Ambassador Theatre Group from 24 October to 14 November 2015. In this interview, Tom Cooper talks to Ricky Ross and Dominic Hill about their compositional and directorial approaches to The Choir, the functioning of the songs within the work, the journey from rehearsal to performance, and the Scottishness of the piece, as well as exploring the Citizens Theatre’s new partnership with Ambassador Theatre Group, created to nurture and produce new ‘local’ musicals.

Queer Shakespeare at the Citizens Theatre

The Citizens Theatre of Glasgow (or Citz) has captivated audiences with its cross-gender cast productions of Shakespeare’s plays; however in the early 1970s, when it was developing its signature performance style, critical response was frequently hostile and homophobic. The “Citz’ style” of Shakespeare includes young actors, recurrent cross-dressing, outrageous actions, frequent nudity, raw sexuality, irreverent tone, frenetic energy, and a camp sensibility. Such a style of performance is appreciably contingent on its appropriation of aspects of gay male culture; although the Citz’ did not consider its work self-referentially “queer,” in examining the company’s 1972 cross-dressed production of Antony and Cleopatra it becomes evident that the signifier applies. I argue that the Citz alludes to several social and historical queer referents: including Shakespeare as a gay icon, gay cultural practices, and gay commodification. These signifiers function concurrently and undergo a process of appropriation and rebranding by the Citz, which then recycles the referents as part of its aforementioned house style. My argument relies on review discourse and a few photographs from the Scottish Theatre archive, taken alongside a consideration of gay culture and queer theatre in the early 1970s. In offering my analysis, I queer the Citz in retrospect, bringing Shakespeare scholars and historians of queer theatre into conversation and intellectual collaboration, and begin to offer a history of queer Shakespeare in the present (and recent past).

Antonio’s (Happy) Ending: Queer Closure in All-Male Twelfth Night

Antonio’s (Happy) Ending:Queer Closure in All-Male Twelfth Night Chad Allen Thomas (bio) It is more or less common knowledge, popularized by John Madden’s film Shakespeare in Love, that in Shakespeare’s time male actors played female roles because women were forbidden from appearing on the public stage. Young men (called “boy-actors”) played romantic ingénues, such as Juliet, whereas mature male actors played comic roles and older women, such as Juliet’s Nurse and Lady Capulet. Whatever the historical context, and whatever response these performances elicited from their original audiences, the tradition of the “transvestite stage” (male actors playing female roles) has helped make early modern plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries compelling for scholars of early modern sexuality.1 Shortly after the start of the English Civil War in 1642, Parliament closed the theaters and banned public stage plays altogether; however, after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Charles II lifted the restriction against women on the public stage, and cross-gender casting quickly became more or less an antiquated practice in the professional theater. Certainly cross-gender casting remained common enough at all-boys and all-girls schools, and even resurfaced on the professional stage as part of British pantomime in the nineteenth century, but the practice was regarded mostly as a relic of days past. In fact, when Ben Greet directed a professional all-male production of As You Like It at the Central London YMCA in 1920—the first such production in 250 years—he explicitly sought to reconstruct the historical past by capitalizing on the premise of recuperating original stage practices.2 After Greet, the next professional all-male production of Shakespeare did not occur for another forty-seven years; however, it broke with Greet’s proposition that historical re-creation was the main reason to present [End Page 221] an all-male production. The National Theatre’s all-male As You Like It (Clifford Williams, 1967) toured across Europe and the United States to great acclaim, extolling “the infinite beauty of Man in love—which lies at the very heart of As You Like It.”3 In Williams’s production, “Man in love” is a metaphor for humanity in a spiritually transcendental state, and he argues that the Forest of Arden is akin to heaven on earth, a place that “transcends sensuality in the search for poetic sexuality.”4 Yet Williams staunchly rejected the notion that his casting of men in women’s roles in this romantic comedy might be affirmative of homosexuality; of course, this is not surprising as Gay Liberation would not start in earnest until 1969. Instead, Williams insisted that his production embodied Jan Kott’s idea of “eroticism free from the limitations of the body…a dream of love free from the limitations of sex. It is for this reason that I employ a male cast, so that we shall not—entranced by the surface reality—miss the interior truth.”5 Even though Williams’s production represents a shift from cross-gendered casting as historical recreation to all-male casts in a modern, conceptual context, it nonetheless seems more aligned with the performative traditions of Panto and was lauded chiefly for its comedic effect. For example, in one of his early roles, Anthony Hopkins as Audrey yodeled and sported a blond wig styled in a big bouffant. More recently, however, a return to the practice of cross-gender casting in Shakespeare has taken place, challenging our modern sensibilities, especially in regard to staging erotic possibility, sexual identity, and gender fluidity. As I argue elsewhere, this movement began in the 1970s at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow (or Citz), which reintroduced cross-gender casting as one of several radical aesthetics of performance in an all-male production of Hamlet (Giles Havergal, 1970). Throughout the 1970s, the Citz presented many cross-gender cast productions of Shakespeare’s plays, which, I argue elsewhere, were performed frequently within the context of the Gay Liberation movement. A few years later, in 1991, Declan Donnellan’s company Cheek by Jowl presented an all-male As You Like It that shared in the Citz’s interest in gay male culture, but...

QUARTET: Directed by Dustin Hoffman

Presented by the National Theatre of Scotland, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Citizens Theatre, Pachamama Productions, Jordan Richard Productions Ltd in association with Merrigong Theatre Company, Australia Don't go to Quartet expecting a dose of realism. Life in a retirement home is probably too grim for entertainment but indulge yourself for a moment with the fantasy that a small stately home, luxuriously furnished and well staffed, can be the resting place for impecunious, retired singers and musicians, still in possession of their wits and happily making music in their dotage. Where the funding comes from is a question we don't have …

Glasgow Girls Conceived and directed by Cora Bissett

Presented by the National Theatre of Scotland, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Citizens Theatre, Pachamama Productions, Jordan Richard Productions Ltd in association with Merrigong Theatre Company, Australia If you try to find Drumchapel High School on Google Maps, you will find that you also get told that it looms near the bottom of the academic league tables. The one internet review beside it says that it’s a ‘shite skool’. So much for internet reviews, so much for our abilities to measure what often matters more. I live and work a mere mile from Drumchapel High and I never knew a thing about the Glasgow Girls, the bunch of schoolgirls who decided that they …

Don Carlos, by Friedrich Schiller; The Misanthrope

The arrival in 1998 of Toronto’s new theatre company Soulpepper was cause for rejoicing if only because of its wonderfully clear, articulate and passionately committed production of Schiller’s Don Carlos. As many reviewers noted, the company made Schiller’s 200-year-old drama feel like a very contemporary play. This contemporary feeling evidently owed much to Robert David MacDonald’s remarkably lucid translation, made in 1995 for the Glasgow Citizens Theatre, but also apparently resulted from rehearsal processes in which clarity of thinking and articulation of ideas were paramount. Don Carlos was staged in the round at the Du Maurier Theatre at Harbourfront Centre, in repertory with Molière’s The Misanthrope, for six weeks in July and August. Both were directed by Robin Phillips, who reportedly worked fifteen-hour days (perhaps nothing new for Robin Phillips) in order to direct both productions while also running the company’s nine-week workshop for young actors. While Soulpepper’s Misanthrope was considerably less ambitious and less distinguished, largely because of a translation that fitted poorly with the production, it signalled the company’s potential for important future work in comedy. Above all, Soulpepper’s inaugural success more than justified the attempt by a group of actors, led by Diana Leblanc, Diego Matamoros, Nancy Palk and Albert Schultz, to hire a guest director, designers, actors and technicians to present a season of “classics” in downtown Toronto, within two hours’ drive of the Shaw and Stratford Festivals. The company raised two-thirds of its $550,000 budget from public and private donations, many of them from the theatre community, and the rest from box-office revenues and finished the season far enough into the black to guarantee its continued activity in 1999–2000.

Staging Wilde's Society Plays: A Conversation with Philip Prowse (Glasgow Citizens Theatre)

Philip Prowse (b. 1937) is something of an anomaly in contemporary British theatre, a director who comes to his craft from a design rather than a performance background. Trained at London's Slade School of Art, Prowse worked briefly in the model rooms at Covent Garden before becoming stage designer at the Watford Palace in 1967. Two years later he moved on to the Glasgow Citizens Theatre, where he has continued to serve as part of the triumvirate (together with Giles Havergal and Robert David MacDonald) responsible for that company's artistic direction. Over the past two decades Prowse's aesthetic has come to dominate the Citizens, helping to make it unique among Britain's regional troupes, both in its European outlook and in its sumptuous, exuberant theatricality. Through the period Oscar Wilde has been a mainstay of the company's repertoire. In the 1970S Prowse twice designed Havergal's stagings of The Importance of Being Earnest, including a 1977 mounting of the play's four-act version. During the following decade he both directed and designed his own productions of all three of Wilde's society plays, A Woman of No Importance (1984), An Ideal Husband (1986), and Lady Windermere's Fan (1988), claiming to have found them "comedies" and left them "dramas." The accomplishment — regarded by critic Michael Coveney as "the glory of Prowse's work ... in the 1980s" — has led the Guardian's Michael Billington to credit Prowse with "completely revis[ing] our notion of how to play early Oscar" (9 May 1988). In 1991 Prowse made his Royal Shakespeare Company debut with a new production of A Woman of No Importance. Much indebted to his Citizens' staging, it played to full houses at the Barbican, before transferring to the Haymarket for an extended West End run. The following interview was conducted in Prowse's London flat, shortly after the Glasgow opening of his 1993 adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Staging Wilde's Society Plays: A Conversation with Philip Prowse (Glasgow Citizens Theatre)

Philip Prowse (b. 1937) is something of an anomaly in contemporary British theatre, a director who comes to his craft from a design rather than a performance background. Trained at London's Slade School of Art, Prowse worked briefly in the model rooms at Covent Garden before becoming stage designer at the Watford Palace in 1967. Two years later he moved on to the Glasgow Citizens Theatre, where he has continued to serve as part of the triumvirate (together with Giles Havergal and Robert David MacDonald) responsible for that company's artistic direction. Over the past two decades Prowse's aesthetic has come to dominate the Citizens, helping to make it unique among Britain's regional troupes, both in its European outlook and in its sumptuous, exuberant theatricality. Through the period Oscar Wilde has been a mainstay of the company's repertoire. In the 1970S Prowse twice designed Havergal's stagings of The Importance of Being Earnest, including a 1977 mounting of the play's four-act version. During the following decade he both directed and designed his own productions of all three of Wilde's society plays, A Woman of No Importance (1984), An Ideal Husband (1986), and Lady Windermere's Fan (1988), claiming to have found them "comedies" and left them "dramas." The accomplishment — regarded by critic Michael Coveney as "the glory of Prowse's work ... in the 1980s" — has led the Guardian's Michael Billington to credit Prowse with "completely revis[ing] our notion of how to play early Oscar" (9 May 1988). In 1991 Prowse made his Royal Shakespeare Company debut with a new production of A Woman of No Importance. Much indebted to his Citizens' staging, it played to full houses at the Barbican, before transferring to the Haymarket for an extended West End run. The following interview was conducted in Prowse's London flat, shortly after the Glasgow opening of his 1993 adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Adaptation, Action, Response: ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow

Several of the novels of the Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibanez (1867–1928) have provided the basis for theatrical adaptations: but the version of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916) by Peter Granger-Taylor, staged in March 1990 at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, was the first for sixty years. In the following feature, Ian Craven, who teaches in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, provides a full account of Jon Pope's production, considering questions of adaptation, performance, and response, and also paying special attention to the influence of the screen versions of 1921 and 1962. His analysis is complemented by extracts from an interview with the adapter and director. A study by Margaret Eddershaw of Philip Prowse's production of Brecht's Mother Courage, in which Glenda Jackson took the title role during the same season at the Citizens, appeared in NTQ28 (November 1991).

Echt Brecht? ‘Mother Courage‘at the Citizens,1990

The Citizens Theatre in Glasgow has a long and honourable tradition of serving its neighbourhood and its city, and a directorial team which remarkably combines professional distinction with loyalty to their theatre. In view of its reputation for productions of great visual brilliance, it is surprising to be reminded that, of all British repertory theatres, ‘national’ or regional, it has also the strongest continuous tradition of playing Brecht. Margaret Eddershaw, Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies in the University of Lancaster, outlines the history of this tradition, which stretches back even beyond the present triumviral management, and proceeds to look at the most recent encounter of ‘the Cits’ with Brecht, Philip Prowse's 1990 production of Mother Courage. This was significant not only for the director's attitude to Brechtian theory, theatrical and political, in the aftermath of the previous year's events in Eastern Europe, but for its inclusion of an international ‘star’, Glenda Jackson, within the Cits' usually close-knit ensemble – its consequences also, arguably, of ‘political’ as well as theatrical interest.