Glasgow theatre began under fire — literally. The city’s first purpose-built playhouse, opened in 1764 in Alston Street, Grahamston (the vanished village of this site’s Hidden pages), was attacked and burned amid preacher-stoked fury at the devil’s work; its successor in Dunlop Street fared little better with the godly. That theatre took root here at all, against Presbyterian headwinds the Religion pages explain, says everything about the appetite: by the Victorian boom the city’s stages could barely be counted, from legitimate houses to the music halls whose sole survivor, the Britannia Panopticon, has its own page.
The grande dame is the Theatre Royal in Hope Street: on its site since 1867 and, despite its own share of fires, the oldest theatre in Scotland in continuous use — Victorian gilt within, a striking modern foyer tower without, and since the 1970s the home of Scottish Opera and Scottish Ballet, as the opera page tells. Its Edwardian siblings still work nightly: the King’s (1904), whose annual pantomime is a Glasgow institution ranking somewhere between festival and sacrament, generations of the city’s comics serving as its dames; and the Pavilion (also 1904), ‘Scotland’s national theatre of variety’, which ran for over a century famously unsubsidised — kept alive by patter, tribute nights and Francie & Josie’s ghost — the last theatre in Britain where the music-hall audience never actually left.
The Citizens is the world-famous one. Founded in 1943 by James Bridie to give Scotland a serious repertory stage, and resident since 1945 in the Victorian playhouse in the Gorbals, ‘the Citz’ became legendary under the Giles Havergal triumvirate from 1969: European classics staged with scandalous glamour, ticket prices held radically low for its neighbours, and a Gorbals audience and a European reputation in the same stalls — a company whose whole premise was that the poorest district deserved the most sophisticated theatre. After a transformative multi-year rebuild — the theatre’s first in its history — the Citizens has returned to its Gorbals home, its Victorian auditorium conserved inside a remade building.
The late twentieth century widened the map: the Tron carved a new-writing house from the old Trongate kirk; the Tramway — the vast Pollokshields tram depot — announced itself in 1988 by hosting Peter Brook’s eleven-hour Mahabharata, the coup that put Glasgow on Europe’s experimental circuit and helped win the 1990 City of Culture crown; and in 2004 Òran Mór’s A Play, A Pie and A Pint began serving lunchtime drama with refreshments in a converted Byres Road kirk — growing into the most prolific new-play programme in the world, and the most Glaswegian arts formula ever devised: fifty minutes of theatre, pastry included.
From a burned playhouse to a city where opera, panto, the avant-garde and variety all sell out in the same week — Glasgow’s theatre history is the town’s temperament staged: suspicious of pretension, addicted to performance, and convinced, correctly, that a night out is a human right.