Gordon Barr on the Bard in the Botanics festival in Glasgow: 'we're very vulnerable to the weather'
With many of its performances taking place outdoors and almost 80 percent of its income down to ticket sales, Glasgow’s Bard in the Botanics festival is an annual gamble with the weather, writes Joyce McMillan
When Gordon Barr stepped up earlier this month to accept the Best Production of the Year Award at this year’s Critic’s Awards for Theatre in Scotland, few people in the world of Scottish theatre were surprised. As artistic director of Bard In The Botanics - the company that presents a powerful season of Shakespeare and other classics in Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens every summer - Barr may be running a shoestring operation, compared with many of his colleagues. Yet the combination of brilliant classic texts, two magical midsummer settings outdoors in the gardens and in the Kibble Palace, and the gradual development, over more than 20 years, of an acting company whose skills have been honed by contact with some of the greatest dramatic poetry ever written, never fails to produce some breathtaking moments. And Barr’s short but overwhelmingly intense 2024 version of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, staged in the Kibble Palace and starring Nicole Cooper, overtook some spectacular competition to win the CATS premier award for the 2024-25 season.
“We don’t really receive any direct public funding,” says Barr, in a break from rehearsals, “although we depend on massive in-kind support from Glasgow City Council, who give us a very generous deal for the use of the Botanics, and for some storage space there.
“But apart from that - well there are some donations and so on, but 80 per cent of our income is from the box office, and that of course makes us very vulnerable to he vagaries of the Glasgow weather. Last year wasn’t a great summer, and that meant we had to think in terms of a good, popular programme for this year, to try and boost our ticket income again.”
The result is a four-show programme that features outdoor productions - directed by Barr himself - of two of the most popular Shakespeare plays in the canon, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo And Juliet; alongside Kibble Palace versions, by Barr’s associate director Jennifer Dick, of Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus, and her own play Sherlock Holmes: A Scandal In Bohemia, adapted from three of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous Holmes stories.
“All of these plays involve titles that audiences will recognise,” says Barr, “and that they’ll enjoy seeing in new versions. For me, though,” adds Barr, who is famous for his radical gender-shifting approach to Shakespeare’s texts, “this season marks a really interesting return to the first two plays I ever directed in the Botanics, when I arrived in 2004. For Romeo And Juliet, in the second half of the season, I’m looking at quite a modern dress approach. Sam Stopford is playing Romeo, with Lola Aluko as Juliet, and I’m hoping to foreground the young people in the story, and explore how they feel they have been failed by the older generation, and left to live with the broken society they have created.
“And for A Midsummer Night’s Dream - well I think I’m taking a relatively conventional approach this year. At any rate, all four of the lovers will be as written by Shakespeare, in terms of gender; and I’m focusing very much on the play’s relationship with nature. Titania’s fairies will be real magical creatures, spirits of the natural world.
“One thing I have changed, though,” says Barr, “is the relationship between Oberon and Titania, the fairy king and queen. What happens in the original - with Oberon doing Titania wrong, and then using his magic to trick and mock her into accepting it - just seemed too patriarchal, to me.
“So in this version, it will be Oberon who is put under a spell, and who falls in love with an ass. With Allan Steele playing Bottom, that should be fun. And that will be out on our glorious garden stage, of course; where there’s no avoiding the sheer power of the natural world, for better or worse, and whether it smiles on us or not."
The Bard In The Botanics 2025 is at the Botanic Gardens, Glasgow, from 25 June until 2 August. For details see www.bardinthebotanics.co.uk
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