Obituary: Ida Schuster, legendary Scottish actress and world’s oldest podcaster

Ida Schuster, actress and director. Born: 28 September 1918 in Glasgow. Died: 8 April 2020 in Glasgow, aged 101.

Actress Ida Schuster waits her call, behind the scenes of the River City set (Picture: Alan Peebles)

Superb timing is an essential feature of a successful acting career; and the much-loved actress Ida Schuster, who has died in Glasgow aged 101 after a suspected encounter with Covid-19, possessed it to the last. Her career as an actress spanned nine decades, from the early 1930s to her final appearance on the Citizens’ stage in 2015; she played stage roles ranging from brothel-keeper Madame Irma in Jean Genet’s The Balcony at the Citizens’ Theatre, to Sadie the tea lady in the original Traverse production of John Byrne’s The Slab Boys, and went on to appear in TV series including Garnock Way and River City.

And she also, in the last months of her life, became the world’s oldest podcaster, recording – with undimmed sharpness and eloquence, at the last moment before her final exit – a series of podcasts for Janice Forsyth’s Big Light company, under the title Old School, that now form a precious and inimitable record of a life in theatre, and at the heart of Glasgow’s Jewish community, that spanned a vital century of Scottish and European history.

Ida Schuster was born in Glasgow in 1918, the youngest of nine children of Dora and Joseph Schuster, who had arrived in Glasgow from Vilnius in 1899. They joined what was by that time a well-established Jewish community in the south side of Glasgow, dating to the mid-19th century. Ida’s earliest memories, vividly recorded in her podcasts, involved her life as the youngest of a big family – “partly bullied, partly spoiled”– and the wider life of that Gorbals community. She recalled the wonderful smells of her mother’s cooking spreading through the flat, on the eve of the great Jewish feasts; and believed she first began to perform for an audience when she and the other children in the block would play out together in “high back” of their tenement, a natural arena surrounded by windows from which women would “hing oot”, to check on their children below.

As she moved into her teens, her life began to revolve more around the new synagogue and Jewish Institute in South Portland Street, the social hub of the Jewish community. When she was ten, her sister Ray married tailor Avrom Greenbaum, who belonged to a family of intellectuals and musicians, and was a gifted theatre director. By the mid-1930s his Jewish Institute Players had established themselves as leaders on the Scottish amateur drama scene, performing a rich repertoire of European classics and new American drama, mainly by left wing writers such as Clifford Odets and Sylvia Regan.

In 1936 they were runners-up at the annual Scottish Community Drama Association festival with Greenbaum’s own play, The Bread of Affliction, about one of the pogroms which had driven the mass emigration of Jews from central and eastern Europe. In her teen years – while pursuing a day job as a trainee hairdresser in the salon run by brother Michael and his wife – Ida was at the centre of this ferment of creative activity, playing a huge range of roles. “Everyone was a socialist in those days,” says Ida in her podcast, “but as the youngest, I was always more of an observer than an activist. And that was useful, when it came to acting.”

It was also through the Institute that Ida met her future husband, a medical student called Allan Berkeley, who went on to become a well-known Gorbals GP, and doctor to the Citizens’ Theatre Company. During the Second World War, Ida served in the WAAF, while Allan was posted to the Far East, where he endured the horrors of a Japanese prison camp, later documenting his experiences of Japanese war crimes in papers still held in the Glasgow Jewish Institute archive.

Ida wed Allan in 1945, and gave birth to sons Howard and Peter in 1947 and 1949, while helping her husband run his busy GP practice; but she remained passionate about theatre, making time even when her children were small to take part in the postwar revival of Glasgow theatre, eventually turning professional in the 1950’s. Thereafter, as she put it, it was “work as an actor when I could get it, look after the family, and do charitable work in the community when I had time,” as she juggled her many commitments.

The cultural world Ida came from and represented, though – proudly Scottish and Glaswegian, yet alive with connections in both Europe and America – had become a vital element of Glasgow life; and when, in the late 1960s, first Michael Blakemore, and then the great triumvirate of Giles Havergal, Philip Prowse and Robert David MacDonald, became artistic directors of the Citizens’ Theatre, Ida Schuster emerged, in her fifties, as one of the guiding spirits of what became one of the most remarkable, acclaimed theatre companies in Europe, playing roles that ranged from Mary Queen of Scots’s devoted waiting-woman Hannah Kennedy in Philip Prowse’s magnificent 1985 production of Schiller’s Maria Stuart, to Lady Hunstanton in Wilde’s A Woman Of No Importance.

She was always recognised as a character actress, rarely playing leading roles; but she was a magnificently accomplished performer, a lover and supporter of theatre who never missed a first night even when she was not on stage, and a superb company member, offering constant words of comradeship and comfort to her fellow actors, while maintaining her formidable fitness regime by eating endless oranges in the dressing-room, and often standing on her head in preparation for a performance.

Beyond her close association with the Citizens’ Theatre, Ida continued to work in film and TV, directed shows at the Tron Theatre when it opened as a club in the early 1980s, and appeared with many other Scottish theatre companies, playing an entire season at Pitlochry in the early 1970s, and, in 1987, becoming the first-ever Mrs Culfeathers in Tony Roper’s The Steamie.

After Allan’s death in 1990, Ida gradually moved towards something more like retirement. Yet she retained both her huge enthusiasm for theatre and her immense charm and magnetism as a performer, and at the age of 95, during the 2015 celebrations of the Citizens’ Company’s 70th anniversary in its Gorbals street home, almost stole the show from a glittering gala line-up of ex-Citizens’ stars that included John Cairney, Celia Imrie and dozens of others.

Until her health compelled her to move into a care home late last year, Ida remained at home in Glasgow, greatly enjoying theatre trips and other travels with her sons, when they visited from their homes in the Netherlands and Israel, and with her nephew Trevor, son of her older brother Michael, who spent much time with her in her latter years. Sadly, Howard died in the Netherlands of Covid-19 just a few days before his mother; but Ida is survived by son Peter and nephew Trevor, by six grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren, by a Glasgow Jewish community for whom she formed a vital link to its remarkable 20th century history, and by the whole world of Scottish theatre and drama, which she had both represented and supported with such charm and energy, for so many decades.

At the end of her final podcast, the 101-year-old Ida bids farewell in typically forthright style. “God bless you all,” she says. “And what more can one say? Let there be no more wars. Will that do?”

You can hear Ida Schuster’s Old School podcasts, along with a tribute, at www.thebiglight.com/oldschoolJOYCE McMILLAN