It was all too fitting that director Graham Eatough and writer David Greig's audaciously ambitious staging of Alasdair Gray's novel, Lanark, was playing at the Citizens Theatre on September 11th, seventy years to the night since the Gorbals-based theatrical powerhouse first opened. Following Lanark's Edinburgh International Festival premiere, here was an epic take on on a magical-realist story that defies easy categorisation today just as it did when it was first published in 1981, and which both mythologised the powers of the imagination to change a city like Glasgow even as it defined them. If there is a building that could be said to do something similar, it is the Citizens, the theatre more lovingly known to several generations of audiences, actors, directors and designers who've been inspired by the work barely contained within its walls as the Citz. Founded in 1943 as the Citizens Company by playwright James Bridie (Osborne Henry Mavor), gallery owner Tom Honeyman
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.