There have been many golden periods in the British postwar regional theatre – at Bristol, Nottingham, Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham – but few so idiosyncratic, audacious and European as at the Glasgow Citizens theatre under the artistic directorship of Giles Havergal, who has died aged 87.
Havergal, with his co-directors, the designer Philip Prowse and the playwright and translator Robert David MacDonald, ran the beautiful jewel of a Victorian theatre on the south side of the Clyde in the Gorbals from 1969 to 2003, the longest tenure in post of any British director.
The secret of his success was simple: balance the books. If you don’t give the board that headache, they don’t care what you do. The miracle was that this thriftily run organisation won a reputation for extravagant, beautifully costumed productions in a repertoire that included the plays of Tennessee Williams, John Webster and the Jacobeans (a Prowse speciality), Brecht, Pirandello, Goldoni, Karl Kraus, Lermontov, Goethe and even Proust. Remembrance of Things Past was translated by MacDonald in 1980 as A Waste of Time, telling Proust’s story backwards over four hours on a stage of gilded frames. Havergal played Baron de Charlus with debonair, sinister panache.
The tone of outlandish provocation was set with a 1970 all-male production of Hamlet, with nudity, copulation, reams of black satin, over-pitched, screeching delivery and a rock-star lead performance by David Hayman that drove the Scotsman critic on to the front page in horror and led to the cancellation of school party bookings; the kids came along anyway, and the place was packed.
The seats were 50p – a huge banner declared as much across the front entrance – in a theatre where all actors had an equal wage, there was no billing, a free programme and a tone of creative bravado. The philosophy was, said Havergal, that if nobody liked what we do, we were free to do what we liked.
This was in a city where Brecht was box office and all the political squabbles – the lord provost, who never went near the place, said that he did not have to go down a sewer to know that it stank – were defused thanks to the charm and public relations skills of Havergal and his supportive chairman, Bill Taylor, and, it must be said, the unwavering support of the Guardian critic Cordelia Oliver.
It helped that Havergal, Prowse and MacDonald, who took all the auditions, had such finely tuned noses for talent. The stream of superb young actors who started out with them included Mark Rylance, Pierce Brosnan, Celia Imrie, Patricia Quinn, Ann Mitchell, Alan Rickman, Greg Hicks, Rupert Frazer, Jonathan Hyde, Roberta Taylor, Gerard Murphy, Ciarán Hinds, Siân Thomas, Gary Oldman and Rupert Everett.
Havergal managed to establish so flagrantly daring a theatre in the community at large with his Theatre About Glasgow schools programme, a policy of free previews, and a warm welcome to other Scottish companies over the summer months.
When not appearing on the stage himself – his most memorable performances included Old Lady Squeamish in Wycherley’s The Country Wife in 1977 and a solo Death in Venice (as the writer Von Aschenbach) in 2000, which he performed later all over the world – he was in the foyer, every night, welcoming the audience generally and often individually.
He was a tall, genial presence, aquiline-featured, dressed in black, a brilliant communicator who really did believe the show started when the audience first stepped into the theatre. When Glasgow was European city of culture in 1990, Glenda Jackson – who had played an unforgettable Phedra for Prowse and McDonald at the Citizens and Old Vic in 1984 – gave a gut-wrenching, raucous Mother Courage. “It’s a very special theatre,” she said, “in a very special city.”
Havergal was born in Edinburgh, the second son of Henry Havergal, choirmaster, and principal of the Royal Academy of music and drama in Glasgow, and his wife, Margaret (nee Chitty). He was educated at Harrow school in north London, and Christ Church, Oxford, where he made a lifelong friend of the writer Ferdinand Mount.
His first job, in 1961, was as an assistant stage manager in Carlisle, followed by stints at the Oldham Coliseum and Barrow. He was appointed artistic director of the Watford Palace in 1966, where he directed the British premiere of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth starring Vivien Merchant in 1968.
That opening Hamlet featured 18 actors of an average age of 22 years. The policy of “famous plays in interesting ways” with no thought of a transfer to the West End or anywhere else was adhered to throughout, except for an unsuccessful transplant of Molière’s Don Juan to the Roundhouse and the two hit Jackson shows moving to the Old Vic and the Mermaid.
Even in the anarchic 1970s, no other theatre presented something as astonishing as the De Sade Show (1976), whose literary sources included 120 Days of Sodom, the novels Justine and Juliette, and a social/narrative binding derived by MacDonald from the master/servant comedies of Marivaux.
Then there was MacDonald’s Chinchilla (1977), which also visited the Edinburgh festival, a charged meditation on the Venice Lido of Diaghilev replacing Nijinsky in his personal and professional affections with Massine, and expressing what sounded like a manifesto of Havergal’s theatre: “passion for reform, passion for power, passion for beauty, a thirst to show, a lust to tell, a rage to love”.
In the 1980s, a Genet retrospective incorporated the Victorian boxes of the theatre itself into the stage design; Coward’s The Vortex, with Everett and Maria Aitken, offered a pathology of addiction and implied a perennial decadence as well as an absolute modernity; and a budgetary crisis (not the first) impelled Havergal to adapt Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt as a play for four male actors in grey suits and maroon V-necked sweaters.
Travels was a big hit and three years later was remounted in the West End, where it won an Olivier award in 1993. Havergal himself was in the cast, all of whom were versions of the protagonist Henry Pulling, all assuming the other characters without costume changes, Havergal as a suitably imperious Aunt Augusta. As a third-person narrative, in the style of the Shared Experience company, it was simple, and it was brilliant.
In the early 1990s, two smaller studios, one at the back of the stalls, the other on the side of the circle, were added, but all three Citizens spaces were imaginatively programmed, no soft options. So, Death in Venice played alongside Prowse’s revelatory, unsentimental take on Coward’s Cavalcade in the big auditorium in 1999; while, in 2003, a fresh look at a genuinely good thriller, Dial M for Murder, jostled alongside a steamy, gorgeous new studio version of Colette’s Chéri.
The seat prices had risen by now to £12, with £4 concessions, and the still free previews. Havergal had overseen a drastic front-of-house refurbishment, a wonderful new foyer and improved facilities while retaining the style, atmosphere and statuary of the 1878 original.
Outside of the Citizens, Havergal had rediscovered a Scottish classic, Ena Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep, for the 7:84 theatre group in 1982 and adapted (with another Citizens alumnus, Fidelis Morgan), for Shared Experience, Samuel Richardson’s 18th-century epistolary novel Pamela, as well as Elizabeth Bowen’s masterpiece The Heat of the Day in 1987, two years before the Harold Pinter television film appeared.
Over the past two decades, he remained busy in opera, working for Opera North, Minnesota Opera, the Opera Theatre of St Louis and Scottish Opera, and maintained until the end of his life a creative relationship with the American Conservatory theatre of San Francisco – teaching, lecturing and directing. He never lost, he said, the excitement or stimulation of entering the rehearsal room with a crowd of young, enthusiastic actors.
Havergal lived for many years in Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow and Battersea in London, moving in recent years to a tidy terraced house near Clapham Common, where he kept a beautiful small garden. He remained an insatiable theatregoer, serving for some years on the board of the Almeida theatre in Islington, north London.
He was made OBE in 1987 and CBE in 2002 and held honorary doctorates at the universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, and the Scottish academy of music and drama where his father had been principal.
Havergal’s older brother, Malcolm, predeceased him. He is survived by a niece, Louise.
• Giles Pollock Havergal, director and actor, born 9 June 1938; died 23 August 2025
