Giles Havergal – Theatre director, Actor, writer
Born June 9, 1938; died August 23, 2025
Giles Havergal, who has died aged 87, was a towering figure in Scottish theatre. As co-artistic director of Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre for thirty-three years, Havergal helped redraw the theatrical map of Glasgow, Scotland and the world. Working alongside writer/director Robert David MacDonald and designer/director Philip Prowse, from his arrival in the Gorbals in 1969 to his departure in 2003, Havergal blazed a trail of radicalism that reinvigorated the Citz as an international powerhouse.
The tone was set from the start with Havergal’s 1970 all male production of Hamlet that featured nudity, sex and swearing. With the press as outraged as some of the city high hid yins, some schools cancelled their planned visit. The attention this brought to the production made it box office gold, with many school pupils going to see the show of their own volition.
Over the next three decades, Havergal directed 84 Citizens productions, including works by Shakespeare, Brecht, Sean O’Casey, Joe Orton and Arthur Miller. Havergal also commissioned and oversaw 26 Christmas shows.
The role-call of actors who joined a maverick Citz ensemble under Havergal and the triumvirate included David Hayman, Mark Rylance, Ann Mitchell, Gary Oldman, Glenda Jackson, Pierce Brosnan, Laurance Rudic, Celia Imrie, Alan Rickman, Sophie Ward, Rupert Everett, Rupert Frazer, Ciaran Hinds, Sian Thomas and Sean Bean. A new generation of directors and designers were also embraced by the Citz during Havergal’s egalitarian reign, including Kenny Miller and Stewart Laing.
Havergal used the theatre’s occasional cash-strapped state as the mother of invention, as he did with his four-actor adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel, Travels with My Aunt. Appearing himself as both retired bank manager Henry Pulling and his libertine Aunt Augusta, and with the four actors wearing identical sweaters, Havergal’s original 1989 production went on to travel the world, setting a benchmark for literary adaptations. The production won an Olivier Award in 1993 following its West End run, and a New York Drama Desk award in 1995 after appearing off-Broadway.
Havergal did something similar in 1999 with his solo staging of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, adapted with MacDonald. Havergal performed it in Glasgow, New York and San Francisco. Other adaptations by Havergal included PG Wodehouse’s Summer Lightning for the Citz, Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield for Steppenwolf, Chicago, and Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses for American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco.
Havergal performed Samuel Beckett’s play, Krapp’s Last Tape, as well as appearing in numerous other Citz productions. This included some of the company’s more epic stagings such as A Waste of Time – a four hour version of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past; and Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind. He also appeared in productions of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land, The Country Wife, and Don Carlos.
Alongside all this, it was the style and tone Havergal set at the Citz, from the cheap ticket prices, with the unemployed able to get in free; to the way he was there to greet audiences in the theatre foyer at every first night. With a glint in his eye, Havergal was a magnanimous mine host who welcomed everybody with a personal touch. He knew his establishment’s regulars, and was always there with a word and a smile. As many tributes have pointed out, Havergal was the epitome of old school charm.
Coming on the day the Citizens reopened its doors to the public after seven years of extensive rebuilding in preparation for its first new production next month, Havergal’s loss will be felt even more profoundly by the theatrical community for whom he paved the way.
Giles Pollock Havergal was born in Edinburgh, the youngest of two sons to Dr Henry MacLeod Havergal and Margaret (néeChitty). Havergal’s father had been principal of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) between 1953 and 1969. Margaret died young, and Henry later married arts fundraiser Nina (néeDavidson).
Havergal went to school at Harrow in north London, then on to Oxford, where he worked with the Oxford University Experimental Theatre Club. University contemporaries included Ken Loach, future founder of 7:84 Theatre Company John McGrath, David Dimbleby and theatre critic Michael Billington.
Havergal briefly worked as an actor on stage and television, appearing in seasons at the Old Vic and playing the Ghost of Christmas Future in a 1962 TV production of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
In 1964 he became director of the theatre in Barrow-in-Furness, before being appointed director of Watford Palace Theatre the following year. His directing credits there included the British premiere of Tennessee William's Sweet Bird of Youth. This opened the doors for Havergal at the Citizens, where he soon drafted in MacDonald and Prowse.
Outside of the Citz, Havergal directed 7:84’s 1982 revival of Ena Lamont Stewart’s play, Men Should Weep, as part of the company’s Clydebuilt season. He also worked with the Shared Experience company, and with Steppenwolf in Chicago. Havergal worked extensively in opera, overseeing numerous productions at home and abroad. He later worked with students in San Francisco, and worked in secondary schools in Glasgow, Taking the spirit of the Citz’s theatre in education company, TAG (Theatre About Glasgow) with him.
In 2002 Havergal was awarded a CBE, and holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of Glasgow, Strathclyde University and The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
In 2003 he received the Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland’s first ever CATS Whiskers Award for his services to theatre in Scotland. He returned in 2019 to host the event, which fell on his 81st birthday.
In July of this year, the Omnibus Theatre on Clapham Common in London hosted a tribute titled An Evening with Giles Havergal. Organised by his goddaughter, Georgia Graham and her brother Ivo, and with many Citz luminaries in attendance, the night began with Havergal performing a speech from Chinchilla, Robert David MacDonald’s 1977 play based on Diaghilev’s legendary Ballet Russes Company. As actor and Citizens alumnus Rupert Frazer pointed out in a post on social media, in Chinchilla’s impassioned speech about the transformative power of art, MacDonald ‘was really laying down everything that the Citz stood for.’
As MacDonald wrote, quoted by Frazer, ‘Chance perhaps threw us in the way of one another and together we found a way to rid ourselves of a desperate inaction, as frustrating as it was futile. And we work. We make revolutions, we make fashions, we make scandals. Many reasonable people are appalled, many despicable people are delighted, but none of that matters. It comes from us. It is a passion, a disease, a lust. Art can rest on sinister foundations, and has the most intimate knowledge of sickness. They are both the products of excess and there is nothing anyone can do about that. The single-minded concentration of the artist works like a cancer and passion absorbs utterly. Passion for reform, passion for power, passion for beauty; a thirst to show, a lust to tell, a rage to love. It is the only voice we can still trust in a complicated, expensive world.’
In what has turned out to be Havergal and MacDonald’s final collaboration, and Havergal’s last ever public performance, these words are a perfect evocation of a life in the theatre that transformed everything and everyone who came within his orbit.
Eight years earlier Havergal spoke to the Herald prior to a revival of Travels with My Aunt. Reflecting on his three decades with the Citz while sitting in the theatre’s Circle bar surrounded by photographs of the theatre’s past glories, he pointed out how “I just feel fantastically privileged to have been able to do all that. The thirty-three years I was here went in a flash… it doesn't feel like thirty-three years at all. You just think, weren't we all lucky? Weren't we all lucky to find each other, and weren't we all lucky to land here, where it was possible to do it? I keep saying, even the bad times – of which there were lots – were good.”
He is survived by his niece, Louise, and Scotland’s entire theatrical community. His elder brother, Malcolm, pre-deceased him.
The Herald, August 30th 2025
ends
Comments