June 9, 1938 - August 23, 2025

OBITUARY

There is an extraordinary video, available online, of a young Giles Havergal being interviewed by the BBC soon after he took over as artistic director of Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre in 1969. The black-and-white footage is grainy. The city behind him is unrecognisably barren. Yet Havergal, perched elegantly on a wall, exudes enthusiasm.

“Do you see any special problems in trying to keep a theatre surviving in a blasted landscape like we are in now?” asks the interviewer, referencing the Gorbals, the area in which the Citizens sits, and which was then undergoing major redevelopment, with overcrowded tenements being replaced by high-rise flats.

“Oh, I think it is very easy to say it will never work down here,” Havergal says. “I don’t believe that at all. I think if a theatre is really exciting, it will attract its own audience.”

“Do you have any ambition to see thousands of people marching through the Gorbals?” asks the interviewer when Havergal insists that theatre can inspire change. “Oh, yes, absolutely,” Havergal answers with a gleeful glint in his eye. “If we are working, then people should be enraged and thrilled and excited by what we do.”

Havergal, who died aged 87, spent the next 34 years running the Citizens, alongside writer and director Robert David MacDonald and designer Philip Prowse, who joined him as co-directors in 1970. The triumvirate turned the Citizens into one of the most respected theatres in Europe, driven by Havergal’s enthusiasm, espoused in that 1969 interview, to make work that was both provocative and popular.

It began in 1970, with an all-male Hamlet starring David Hayman that featured nudity, sex and swearing galore, and which defied the shocked critics to become a hit – and the daringly designed, unashamedly avant-garde shows kept coming.

Havergal directed 84 plays in Glasgow in total – Shakespeare, Brecht, Orton, Shaw, O’Casey, Sheridan and Miller – plus 26 Christmas productions. His 1989 adaptation of Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt transferred to the West End in 1993, where it won an Olivier award, then it transferred to New York in 1995, where it won a Drama Desk award.

Most of Havergal’s shows in Scotland were with the Citizens, but he also worked with Shared Experience and 7:84 Theatre Company. His 7:84 revival of Ena Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep, which ran at the Citizens in 1982, restored the play to its rightful place in the canon. He directed opera, too, in Scotland and around the world.

Under Havergal, the Citizens became a hotbed of acting talent. Mark Rylance, Celia Imrie, Alan Rickman, Greg Hicks, Ciarán Hinds and Gary Oldman all gained early experience there. Glenda Jackson gave one of the performances of her career there as Mother Courage in 1990, when Glasgow was European City of Culture. Havergal had worked as an actor earlier in his career – he was the Ghost of Christmas Future in a 1962 television version of A Christmas Carol – and sometimes took to the stage at the Citizens, most notably in his and MacDonald’s one-man adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, which opened in Glasgow in 2000 and then toured the world.

Havergal innovated off stage, too. He set up two studio spaces. He kept prices low – “ALL TICKETS 50p” proclaimed a banner outside – and previews free. He championed the schools programme Theatre About Glasgow, oversaw a refurbishment of the Citizens in 1989 and genially welcomed audiences to his theatre every night.

Havergal was born in Edinburgh, the son of Henry Havergal, an educator who became principal of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. He studied at Harrow School, then Oxford University, where he joined the Experimental Theatre Club, crossing paths with John McGrath and Ken Loach.

Havergal’s first job in theatre was as an assistant stage manager in Carlisle in 1961. Roles at Barrow-in-Furness and Oldham followed, before he was appointed artistic director of Watford Palace Theatre in 1966. Three years later, he arrived in Glasgow.

Then, the Citizens was in the doldrums, having been through seven directors in nine years. When Havergal left in 2003, having guided it through the social, political and economic upheavals of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, it was a powerhouse.

Havergal was appointed OBE in 1987 and CBE in 2002, then left both the Citizens and Scotland in 2003, moving to London, where he sat on the board of the Almeida Theatre, continued to direct opera, worked as a lecturer and went to the theatre regularly.

Poignantly, he died on the same day that the Citizens finally reopened to the public after a stunning, seven-year, £40 million redevelopment.

Current artistic director Dominic Hill said: “He always took great interest in how the theatre was faring and the work we were presenting, even after leaving Glasgow.”

Hill added: “I am sorry that he will never see the newly restored theatre, but his legacy is hard-wired into the fabric of the building and his name will always be associated with it.”

Giles Pollock Havergal was born on June 9, 1938, and died on August 23. His older brother, Malcolm, predeceased him. He is survived by a niece, Louise.

Source: https://www.thestage.co.uk/obituaries--archive/obituaries/giles-havergal-actor-artistic-director