by There were many golden periods in the British regional theatre after the war – in Bristol, Nottingham, Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham – but only a few as idiosyncratic, Kühn and European as in the Glasgow Citizens Theater under the artistic director of Giles Havergal, who died at the age of 87.
Havergal with his co-director, designer Philip Prowse and the playwright and translator Robert David Macdonald, headed the beautiful jewel of a Victorian theater on the south side of Clyde in the Gorbal, the longest term of every British director.
The secret of his success was simple: equalizing the books. If you don’t give the board this headache, you don’t care what you do. The miracle was that this economical organization won a reputation for extravagant, beautifully costumed productions in a repertoire that included the plays by Tennessee Williams, John Webster and the JakoBäden (a ProWse specialty), Brecht, Pirandello, Goldoni, Karl Kraus, Lermontov, Goethe and even Pirandello. The memory of the past things was translated by Macdonald in 1980 as a waste of time and told Proust’s story about four hours in a level of gilded frames. Havergal played Baron de Charlus with Debonair, Sinister Panache.
The tone of the unusual provocation was with an all-male production by Hamlet from 1970 with nudity, copulation, the black satin, scolding, screeching delivery and a rock-star leadership of David Hayman, who drove the Scottish critic before the Schotten critic drove on the front page before the Schotten critic was taken up and led to the cancellation of school products. The children came anyway and the place was full.
The seats were 50p – a huge banner that was just as much explained over the front entrance – in a theater in which all actors had the same wages, there was no billing, a free program and a tone of creative Bravado. The philosophy was, Havergal said that we were free if nobody liked what we did, what liked us.
This was in a city in which Brecht was a box office and all political disputes -the Lord provost that never went close to the place said that he did not have to go along with a sewer to know that it became stank thanks to the charm and public abilities of Havergal and its supporting chairman Bill Taylor, and it must be the inexhaustible support of the Guardian criticism, Cordelia, Cordelia, and Untested support of the Guardian criticism, Cordelia Oliver.
It helped that Havergal, Prowse and Macdonald, who took all the auditions, had such finely coordinated noses for talents. The stream of excellent young actors who started 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, Siân.
Havergal managed to build such an obvious car in the community with his theater about Glasgow School’s program, a policy of free preliminary views and a warm welcome in the summer months.
When he did not appear on stage himself – his most memorable appearances in 1977 were in Wycherleys The Country Wife in 1977 and in Venice (as a writer of Aschenbach), which he later appeared all over the world – he was in the foyer every evening and welcomed the audience in general and often individual.
He was a great, brilliant presence, made with aquiline, dressed in black, a brilliant communicator who really believed that the show started when the audience stepped into the theater for the first time. When Glasgow was the European City of Culture in 1990, Glenda Jackson, who had played an unforgettable Phedra for Prowse and McDonald among the citizens and Old Vic in 1984, gave a brave, roughness mother’s courage. “It’s a very special theater,” she said, “in a very special city.”
Havergal was born in Edinburgh, the second son of Henry Havergal, Choirmaster, and director of the Royal Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, and his wife Margaret (born Chitty). He was trained at the Harrow School in North -London and Christ Church in Oxford, where he found a lifelong friend of the writer Ferdinand Mount.
His first job in 1961 was the deputy stage manager in Carlisle, followed by stints in Oldham Coliseum and Barrow. He was appointed artistic director of the Watford Palace in 1966, where he led the British premiere of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth with Vivien Merchant with Vivien Merchant in 1968.
This opened Hamlet showed 18 actors in the average age of 22 years. The policy of the “famous pieces” in an interesting way, without being thought of a transfer to the West End or somewhere else, was considered everywhere with the exception of an unsuccessful transplant from Molières Don Juan to the Roundhouse and the two hit shows that Jackson switched to the old VIC and Mermaid.
Even in the anarchic 1970s, no other theater presented something as astonishing as The de Sade Show (1976), the literary sources of which 120 days of Sodom, the novels Justine and Juliette and a social/narrative bond by MacDonald from the comedies of Marivaux by Macdonald.
Then there was Macdonald’s Chinchilla (1977), which also visited the Edinburgh Festival, an charged meditation about the Venice Lido from Diaghilev replaced Nijinsky in his personal and professional inclinations with masses and expression, which expresses like a manifesto from Havergal’s Theater.
In the 1980s, a genet of retrospective integrated the Victorian boxes of the theater into the stage design. Cowards the Vortex with Everett and Maria Aitken offered a pathology of addiction and implied a decadence and an absolute modernity. And a budget crisis (not the first) Havergal, Graham Greenes trips with my aunt to adapt as a game for four male actors in gray suits and chestnut brown Pleas-Pullinder.
Travels was a great success and three years later it was rated in the West End, where it was awarded an Olivier Award in 1993. Havergal himself was in the line -up, which was all versions of the protagonist Henry Pulling, all the other characters without costume changes, Havergal accepted as appropriate imperious aunt Augusta. As a story of the third person, she was simple and brilliant in the style of the Shared Experience Company.
In the early nineties, two smaller studios were added on the back of the stands, the other on the side of the circle, but all three civil rooms were programmed, no soft options. In addition to Prowses, death in Venice played in addition to Prowse’s unrealimental attitude against Coward’s cavalry in the Big Auditorium in 1999. While 2003 a new look at a really good thriller who decides murder for the murder, in addition to a steaming, beautiful new studio version of Colettes Chéri.
The seat prices had now risen to 12 GBP, with 4 GBP access and the free prerequisites. Havergal had supervised a drastic renovation, a wonderful new foyer and an improved facilities, while he retained the style, the atmosphere and the statues of the original in 1878.
Outside of the citizens, Havergal had a Scottish classic, Ena Lamont Stewarts men, rediscovered and adapted for the 7:84 Theater Group (with another citizen-alumnus Fidelis Morgan) in order to form joint experience in the 28th century heating figures from the 18th century. Harold Pinter -TV film appeared.
In the past two decades he has been in the opera and worked for Opera North, Minnesota Opera, the Opera Theater of St. Louis and the Scottish Opera, and was a creative relationship with the American Conservatory of San Francisco – Lecture and Director until the end of his life. He never lost, he said, the excitement or suggestion to penetrate the rehearsal room with a lot of young, enthusiastic actors.
Havergal lived in the Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow and Battersea in London for many years and has moved to a decent terrace house near Clapham Common in recent years, where he kept a nice small garden. He remained an insatiable theater that served on the board of Almeida Theater in Islington, Nordlondon for several years.
He was appointed an OBE in 1987 and CBE in 2002 and stopped at the universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde and the Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, in which his father was director, and at the Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.
Havergal’s older brother Malcolm died. He is survived by a niece, Louise.
• Giles Pollock Havergal, director and actor, born on June 9, 1938; died on August 23, 2025
