When the Citizens Theatre reopened its doors in August 2025, the spruced up Gorbals based emporium promised much for what lay beyond its new glass frontage. Here, after all, was a Glasgow institution that was back after seven years following the building’s first ever major redevelopment since the building first opened as a theatre in 1878. This new makeover was to make it fit for purpose for twenty-first century audiences and artists alike.
Starting as it meant to go on, the Citz’s opening statement on stage came with Small Acts of Love, Frances Poet’s epic drama that looked at the aftermath of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Poet’s script was developed out of interviews with survivors and families of those whose lives were changed by the tragedy forever. Created in association with the National Theatre of Scotland, and featuring new songs by Ricky Ross, the result was a big, ambitious production, full of heart.
After seven years without a stage to call his own, artistic director Dominic Hill used the full expanse of the revitalised space to show off its wares. This was the case in both human and technical terms, as Hill navigated his cast of more than twenty around multiple narratives that saw them play at least twice that amount of roles throughout what the Herald acknowledged as a momentous occasion. This was the case both on stage and off.
The play itself was watched by an audience sat in a discreetly refurbished auditorium that retained the spirit of the Citz. It was in its spacious new foyer and bar area where the changes were more obvious. Not for nothing was the Citizens Theatre announced last week as winner of the Glasgow Times backed Heritage Champion Award in the Herald’s Inspiring City Awards.
Since Small Acts of Love, the Citz has continued to put on a series of big plays with big ideas that picked up where the theatre left off eight years ago. ‘Epic and Intimate’ was the theatre’s new tagline, and so it has proven right up to the current production of 1984, an adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian novel by Chris Hannan. Made in co-production with Dundee Rep and Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre, Hill’s production reunited him and the Citz with Hannan. The pair first worked together at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, where Hill directed Hannan’s play, The Three Musketeers and the Princess of Spain The relationship continued with a version of Dostoyevsky’s novel, Crime and Punishment, produced at the Citizens in 2013.
Inbetween Small Acts of Love and 1984, the Citz has presented a series of equally dazzling works. Christmastime saw Hill and Joanna Bowman direct Lewis Hetherington’s new take on Beauty and the Beast, while the theatre’s expansive new studio theatre hosted a radical take on George Bernard Shaw’s play, Saint Joan. The latter was directed by Stewart Laing in a production led by the Raw Material company with Perth Theatre, and Aberdeen Performing Arts in association with the Citz. Laing’s history with the Gorbals theatre as both a designer and director dates back to Giles Havergal’s lengthy tenure as artistic director, when Laing’s reimaginings of the classics were a key part of the theatre’s programme. This made his presence in the reopening season significant.
Back in the main house, Hill oversaw a new production of Samuel Beckett’s twentieth century classic, Waiting for Godot. This starred George Costigan and Matthew Kelly as Beckett’s tragicomic double act, Vladimir and Estragon, with Costigan and Kelly’s own lifelong friendship a boon to this co-production between the Citz, Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse and Bolton Octagon.
With Costigan having appeared at the Citz in Hill’s productions of Crime and Punishment and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, as with Hannan and Laing, drawing collaborators from the theatrical equivalent of a boot room paid serious dividends. Hill’s ongoing working relationship with designer Tom Piper and composer Nikola Kodjabashia is further testament to retaining some kind of continuum, both in the theatre’s artistic personnel and a loose pool of actors that might be classed as an informal ensemble.
Godot was followed by Sweat, a Pulitzer Prize winning play by American writer Lynn Nottage about the fallout of what happens in a blue collar town reliant on heavy industry when the factory owners pull out. This co-production between the Citz and the Royal Lyceum was directed by Joanna Bowman, who had been appointed in November 2025 as one of the Citz’s new associate artists. Theatre companies Wonder Fools and Bijli also joined the Citizens family as associates.
The season continued with The Long Drop, Linda McLean’s stage version of Denise Mina’s true crime novel based around 1950s Glasgow serial killer Peter Manuel. This intense stage noir looked at events that took place in an underworld of spit and sawdust dives that once existed on the Citz’s doorstep. As with the Epic and Intimate tagline, the mix of local and global has always been as much a part of the Citizens Theatre ethos. As too is the mix of the contemporary and the classical.
As the nouveau Citz moves into its second year, audience figures suggest such ambition has paid off, with 83,700 tickets booked across 377 performances. Add on the more than 2,000 people who attended the theatre’s opening Homecoming weekend of free performances and community based celebrations throughout the building, and this means that more than 100,000 people have visited the Citz in the last year.
The Citz’s success over the last year appears to have proven that the aforementioned big plays with big ideas can still resonate with audiences on a grand scale. While this is an attitude that has shaped the Citz since tits inception as a producing company in 1945, it has only been able to produce such large scale work by working with other theatres as highlighted above. This is the economic reality with which most theatre companies must work, with such partnerships a necessity.
With visiting main stage productions of Emma Rice’s Tristan & Yseult and the National Theatre of Scotland’s new take on The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie forthcoming alongside Citz co-productions of East is East and Othello to follow, as 1984 tours the country beyond the Gorbals, the best may be yet to come.
Throughout the 1970s up to the mid 1980s, the Citz issued a series of now rare coffee table size photo books, with each compiling several seasons worth of production images. Given the visual splendour of each show, the four volumes published were not only important archival compendiums, but also works of art in their own right. The last of these featured a striking image of Havergal acting in Prowse’s production of MacDonald’s 1977 play, Chinchilla, which looked at life and art through the eyes of a theatrical impresario modelled on Sergei Diaghilev.
While the series of books stopped after 1985, presumably after the money ran out, following such an impressive reopening season, maybe now is time to revive them in some form. With much to look forward to in whatever the Citz has planned next, this first season has already been theatrical history in the making.
1984 runs at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow until 26 September, before touring to Dundee Rep, £0 September-10 October; His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, 13-17 October, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh 27 October-7 November.
www.citz.co.uk
The Herald, September 25th 2026
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