'The witch Sturgeon ruined Scottish arts,' says actor Rupert Everett

The Herald Scotland

14-06-2025

Now 66, Everett came to Glasgow at the end of the 1970s to work at the Citz. He loved the experience.
'Glasgow was very stimulating. A different city to what it is now. When I got there the Gorbals had just come down and those horrible towers had just gone up. They were kind of magnificent in a weird way.
Read more
"In the wintertime that bus used to go down Gorbals Street lit at night and you just saw these towers and for me it was the best period of my life probably, being at the Citizens. It's when my education started and I found creatively it was a magnificent place to be.'
He talks about the theatre and the city with huge affection. 'I lived in a series of fun places. I used to live with a professor from the university in his house off the Byres Road and then with my aunt and uncle in Helensburgh. Then they moved into Kirklee Circus.
'Being in the theatre was incredible because it had a relationship with the audience that I haven't really come across since. It was an audience that sometimes came because it was a cheap place to go and hang out. There was such a variety of people. But it wasn't necessarily highbrow. It was people who came and you entertained them. Or not. And they were quite vocal sometimes if they didn't like what they were seeing.
Rupert Everett in Vortex at the Citizen's Theatre in 1988 (Image: unknown)
'I think it was very spoiling. It was very direct. It's how I imagine the relationship with the audience must have been in the Restoration in a way. It was a collaborative thing between the audience. A very vocal audience. It was literally like going into Aladdin's cave, going into the Citizens.
'For me it was a magical time and every time I get up to Glasgow on the train, as soon as I get to Motherwell I get palpitations almost.
'You used to be able to see the Citizens from the train. You can't anymore.'
Of all the people he has worked with in his career it is Philip Prowse, who along with Giles Havergil and Robert David MacDonald, ran the Citizens while he was there, that he singles out. 'Philip stands out as the person who has had the biggest influence on my life. Male.
The Citizens theatre redevelopment is the first major makeover of the building since it began life as a working theatre in 1878 (Image: Gordon Terris)
'I became great friends with both Philip Prowse and Robert David McDonald. They were amazingly clever people. They were really wonderful teachers to be around.
'To be in plays like David's adaptation of the complete works of Proust, for example … I started learning about everything.'
That was the extraordinary thing about the Citz, he says. Its ambition. 'It was a European theatre in the same vein as Peter Stein, Pina Bauch. It was a national European theatre. And unlike those theatres, it never ran at a loss. It presented an uncompromising array of work to people that it never patronised. As soon as the witch Sturgeon came into power everything changed in Scottish arts and everything had to be about being Scottish.
'In the whole United Kingdom there was nothing like that theatre.
'It was one of the most extraordinary cultural events I think in the British scene postwar, frankly.'
And will he be heading to Glasgow for the reopening in September?
'If I'm here I will get up. I'd love to get up.'