World is a stage for Hill

They range from Zinnie Harris’s wartime drama, Fall, to co-productions with the National Theatre of Scotland, Oran Mor and, with Edinburgh International Festival, Rona Munro’s The Last Witch.

Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, Ursula Rani Sarma’s The Dark Things, Linda McLean’s Any Given Day, and most recently, Chris Hannan’s swashbuckling take on The Three Musketeers and the Princess of Spain are all up there.

It’s an impressive body of work, and if there’s any feeling of memorial in such a display, it’s accentuated by Hill’s appointment to head the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow from October. With Hill’s Traverse swansong yet to come this August, The Herald’s exclusive announcement of the Citz’s first season under his tenure can reveal that, while he won’t be directing anything himself until spring 2012, Hill has chosen the season’s flagship in-house production. A Day in the Death of Joe Egg lays down a stamp of the contemporary and the classical that looks set to be a hallmark of Hill’s reign. Especially as Peter Nichols’s 1967 play had its premiere at the Citizens prior to a west end transfer starring Albert Finney.

“Joe Egg is a play I’ve always loved,” Hill says of Nichols’s play about the strains put on a couple’s marriage as they struggle to raise a daughter with cerebral palsy. “I think it has this extraordinarily rough, raw kind of theatricality and emotion to it, because it comes from a very personal place for the writer. I don’t think a lot of people know Joe Egg started at the Citz, so it’s exciting that it returns to where it was born. It’s also a play that has a vaudeville, stand-up feel to it, even though the subject matter is pretty brutal, and that absolutely suits that theatre. Joe Egg is a play that lots of people know about, but which hardly anybody’s seen, so it feels right to start with it.”

Also in the autumn season is the National Theatre of Scotland’s revival of Ena Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep, another classic play made famous at the Citz in Giles Havergal’s 1982 revival for John McGrath’s 7:84 company. The only other main stage in-house show will be Alan McHugh’s take on Hansel and Gretal for the Christmas season, the theatre’s Stalls Studio will host Ulla, a new children’s show by Clare McGarry in association with the Citz, while in the Circle Studio the Young Co gear up for Halloween with Gothic, while the Community Company host their latest instalment of A Wicked Christmas.

The Glasgay! festival will present two new works, Spain by James Ley and Martin O’Connor’s Ch Ch Changes. An adaptation of Robert Tressell’s seminal working class novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, will be presented by Townsend Theatre Productions. It’s the first show of the season that hints at where Hill’s ambitions lie.

Scottish Opera’s production of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, seen and heard in a new translation by Rory Bremner, has already been highlighted on these pages. Given Hill’s championing of music at the Traverse during his reign there, both through chamber operas from Music Theatre Wales and collaborations with composer John Harris’s Red Note Ensemble, the show looks like an accidental continuum, especially as Hill is one of only a few theatre directors in Scotland who can convincingly direct opera, a talent he shares with Citz alumni including Giles Havergal, Philip Prowse and Stewart Laing.

“I like what Scottish Opera are doing in terms of trying to break that mould of just creating opera to be done in huge theatres,” Hill says. “There’s an opportunity for them in terms of small-scale works. A lot of 18th-century works would work really well in that space, so hopefully Orpheus will be the beginning.”

Hill talks like a child who’s been given the keys to the best toybox ever.

“There are a small number of theatres in the UK that you think, ‘I’d love to have it,’” says Hill. “That’s always been the case with the Citz, and previewing The Last Witch there reinforced that. Working in it you realise the space is extraordinary. It’s intimate, epic, rough, dirty, faded and haunted. Which is everything a theatre should be. It reminds me of places like the Berliner Ensemble and other theatres that are alive with history and theatricality. So when the opportunity came to apply for the job I felt I couldn’t turn it down.”

There’s something too about being able to present classic works on a grand scale. Few directors in Scotland apart from Hill understand how to work a big space. This is evident from Hill’s time as co-director of Dundee Rep, where he directed the likes of Howard Barker’s Scenes From An Execution and – crucially – an audaciously huge production of Peer Gynt. Only the sainted Citz triumvirate of Havergal, Prowse and Robert David MacDonald did something similar. A taste of what may be about to take the Gorbals by storm could be found in Hill’s recent production of The City Madam for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

“I think there’s a huge opportunity in Scottish theatre to reinvigorate that space,” Hill says of the Citz. “On the west coast there is no large-scale classical work being produced, which is ridiculous, so it felt like there was a gap in terms of cultural vision.”

For all the reasons outlined, if there was any sense of disappointment in the Traverse at his departure, there was little surprise, despite his successes in opening out the space to less formal events. “The Traverse at its most thrilling is when you’ve got the festival atmosphere permeating throughout the year,” Hill says.

Whoever his replacement is, and tongues are already wagging, Hill’s experience is telling. “I think we need to find a way to get more work on stage,” he says. “I wish that had been possible over the last few years, because there’s no point in developing writers if you can’t get their work on. If there’s not going to be any more money, you just have to think about how you spend it, and strip everything back. The same thing of getting more work on applies to the Citz, because there is not enough company work on, and that has to change, otherwise I don’t know what it’s there for.

“I want to find ways of putting on large-scale, exciting, innovative work, mainly rooted in the classical repertoire. We need to get an audience back in there and make the Citz a sexy, exciting place. To do that we need to be ambitious in terms of style and presentation. Theatre for me always has to be an event. You’re halfway there with that theatre, which jump-starts what can happen on the stage. It has to be thrilling.”

Tickets for the Citizens Theatre’s autumn season are on sale from today. Visit www.citz.co.uk.