Where were we? Oh, yes. It was April 2018 and the Citizens Theatre was rounding off its in-house spring season with Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. It was a cracking show, with an explosive George Costigan as the patriarchal James Tyrone, marking yet another tough, intelligent production by artistic director Dominic Hill. The idea was the Glasgow theatre would then close for refurbishment (fix all those leaks where the rain got in, restore the crumbling walls, reconfigure the foyer) and spend a couple of years in exile up the road at Tramway. After that, it would return to a fancy new building in the autumn of 2020.
Was that wishful thinking? It’s rare for a big building project to run to schedule and this one was certainly big. The initial budget was £19.4m and promised the largest structural changes since the theatre was built in 1878. Indeed, it took less than a year for the budget to be revised upwards to £21.5m and the return date put back to summer 2021.
That was before the contractors had moved in. A building that originally opened as Her Majesty’s Theatre And Royal Opera House with a production of Ali Baba And The 40 Thieves (beset by technical problems of its own) was bound to offer a few snags along the way. And there were snags: who knew the safety curtain would be full of asbestos? Who knew it would have to be sliced apart before being taken out? Who knew the delays that would follow? [READ MORE]