Giles Havergal obituary | Theatre

There have been many golden durations within the British postwar regional theatre – at Bristol, Nottingham, Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham – however few so idiosyncratic, audacious and European as on the Glasgow Citizens theatre beneath the inventive directorship of Giles Havergal, who has died aged 87.

Havergal, together with his co-directors, the designer Philip Prowse and the playwright and translator Robert David MacDonald, ran the gorgeous jewel of a Victorian theatre on the south aspect of the Clyde within the Gorbals from 1969 to 2003, the longest tenure in publish of any British director.

The secret of his success was easy: stability 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 received a fame for extravagant, fantastically costumed productions in a repertoire that included the performs 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 4 hours on a stage of gilded frames. Havergal performed Baron de Charlus with debonair, sinister panache.

The tone of outlandish provocation was set with a 1970 all-male manufacturing of Hamlet, with nudity, copulation, reams of black satin, over-pitched, screeching supply and a rock-star lead efficiency by David Hayman that drove the Scotsman critic on to the entrance web page in horror and led to the cancellation of college occasion bookings; the youngsters got here alongside anyway, and the place was packed.

The seats have been 50p – an enormous banner declared as a lot throughout the entrance entrance – in a theatre the place all actors had an equal wage, there was no billing, a free programme and a tone of inventive bravado. The philosophy was, stated Havergal, that if no one preferred what we do, we have been free to do what we preferred.

This was in a metropolis the place Brecht was field workplace and all of the political squabbles – the lord provost, who by no means went close to the place, stated that he didn’t should go down a sewer to know that it stank – have been defused because of the allure and public relations expertise of Havergal and his supportive chairman, Bill Taylor, and, it have to be stated, the unwavering assist of the Guardian critic Cordelia Oliver.

It helped that Havergal, Prowse and MacDonald, who took all of the auditions, had such finely tuned noses for expertise. The stream of very good younger actors who began 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 ascertain so flagrantly daring a theatre locally at massive together with his Theatre About Glasgow faculties programme, a coverage of free previews, and a heat welcome to different Scottish corporations over the summer season months.

When not showing 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 author Von Aschenbach) in 2000, which he carried out later everywhere in the world – he was within the lobby, each night time, welcoming the viewers typically and infrequently individually.

He was a tall, genial presence, aquiline-featured, wearing black, an excellent communicator who actually did consider the present began when the viewers first stepped into the theatre. When Glasgow was European metropolis of tradition in 1990, Glenda Jackson – who had performed an unforgettable Phedra for Prowse and McDonald on the Citizens and Old Vic in 1984 – gave a gut-wrenching, raucous Mother Courage. “It’s a very special theatre,” she stated, “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 spouse, Margaret (nee Chitty). He was educated at Harrow college in north London, and Christ Church, Oxford, the place he made a lifelong buddy of the author Ferdinand Mount.

His first job, in 1961, was as an assistant stage supervisor in Carlisle, adopted by stints on the Oldham Coliseum and Barrow. He was appointed inventive director of the Watford Palace in 1966, the place 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 a mean age of twenty-two years. The coverage of “famous plays in interesting ways” with no considered a switch to the West End or wherever else was adhered to all through, aside from an unsuccessful transplant of Molière’s Don Juan to the Roundhouse and the 2 hit Jackson exhibits shifting to the Old Vic and the Mermaid.

Even within the anarchic Seventies, no different theatre introduced one thing as astonishing because 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 grasp/servant comedies of Marivaux.

Then there was MacDonald’s Chinchilla (1977), which additionally visited the Edinburgh competition, a charged meditation on the Venice Lido of Diaghilev changing Nijinsky in his private {and professional} affections with Massine, and expressing what appeared 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 Eighties, a Genet retrospective included the Victorian containers of the theatre itself into the stage design; Coward’s The Vortex, with Everett and Maria Aitken, supplied a pathology of dependancy and implied a perennial decadence in addition to an absolute modernity; and a budgetary disaster (not the primary) impelled Havergal to adapt Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt as a play for 4 male actors in gray fits and maroon V-necked sweaters.

Travels was a giant hit and three years later was remounted within the West End, the place it received an Olivier award in 1993. Havergal himself was within the forged, all of whom have been variations of the protagonist Henry Pulling, all assuming the opposite characters with out costume adjustments, Havergal as a suitably imperious Aunt Augusta. As a third-person narrative, within the model of the Shared Experience firm, it was easy, and it was sensible.

In the early Nineties, two smaller studios, one behind the stalls, the opposite on the aspect of the circle, have been added, however all three Citizens areas have been imaginatively programmed, no mushy choices. So, Death in Venice performed alongside Prowse’s revelatory, unsentimental tackle Coward’s Cavalcade within the large auditorium in 1999; whereas, in 2003, a contemporary have a look at a genuinely good thriller, Dial M for Murder, jostled alongside a steamy, attractive new studio model of Colette’s Chéri.

The seat costs had risen by now to £12, with £4 concessions, and the nonetheless free previews. Havergal had overseen a drastic front-of-house refurbishment, an exquisite new lobby and improved services whereas retaining the model, environment and statuary of the 1878 authentic.

Outside of the Citizens, Havergal had rediscovered a Scottish basic, Ena Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep, for the 7:84 theatre group in 1982 and tailored (with one other Citizens alumnus, Fidelis Morgan), for Shared Experience, Samuel Richardson’s 18th-century epistolary novel Pamela, in addition to Elizabeth Bowen’s masterpiece The Heat of the Day in 1987, two years earlier than the Harold Pinter tv movie appeared.

Over the previous twenty years, he remained busy in opera, working for Opera North, Minnesota Opera, the Opera Theatre of St Louis and Scottish Opera, and maintained till the tip of his life a inventive relationship with the American Conservatory theatre of San Francisco – educating, lecturing and directing. He by no means misplaced, he stated, the thrill or stimulation of getting into the rehearsal room with a crowd of younger, enthusiastic actors.

Havergal lived for a few years in Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow and Battersea in London, shifting lately to a tidy terraced home close to Clapham Common, the place he stored a wonderful small backyard. 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 on the universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, and the Scottish academy of music and drama the place his father had been principal.

Havergal’s older brother, Malcolm, predeceased him. He is survived by a niece, Louise.