Reopened Govanhill Baths to be the venue for ‘immersive’ drama

THE theatrical experience is about to plumb new depths when an audience is invited to take a dip in a famous old swimming pool.

Up to 30 theatre-goers will be given the opportunity to strip down to their costumes when Govanhill Baths in Glasgow hosts Lifeguard, a new “immersive” play from controversial artist Adrian Howells.

The performances, which start next month, have been made possible by a grant of more than £70,000 from the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS), which wants to stage plays in unusual venues.

The NTS funds have helped fixed the leaks, upgrade the heating and filled the pool with unmistakably scented water.

The baths are being reopened as part of a £3.25 million project to turn the Edwardian landmark into a community wellness centre. Andrew Johnson, chairman of Govanhill Baths Community Trust, which took over the baths after the city council closed it down 11 years ago, said: “That first blast of chlorine was unbelievable.

“It was a real sense of joy and satisfaction. We don’t want to be churlish about saying ‘told you so’ to the council but there was an element of a battle against authorities who think they know better.

“You closed this place and you were wrong, and we’ve opened it. Now look what’s happening.”

Lifeguard, a co-production with Glasgow’s Arches, will see an audience of 30 gather around the re-opened toddler pool to watch Glasgow-based Howells and actor Ira Mandela Siobhan perform in the water. Showers and changing rooms for the audience members – who are invited to wear their swimsuits for the performance – will be completed before opening night on 5 October.

Howells, a performance artist who made headlines at the 2011 Edinburgh Festival Fringe by giving one-person audiences a bath, is currently artist-in-residence at The Arches. He discovered Govanhill Baths while working in the community and Lifeguard was inspired by the pool and the stories he heard about it.

The performances will “invite audiences to engage with their memories of swimming pools and their relationships with water. In the evocative setting of the training pool in the old Baths, audiences will have the opportunity to enter into a multi-sensory poolside encounter with their own ‘lifeguard’.”

“The piece sprang from the space,” said Nick Millar, the production manager. “As soon as Adrian saw the small pool he thought he’d like to do something there.”

The practicalities were passed to Millar, who has staged theatre in shops, the banks of the Clyde and an empty swimming pool before. Govanhill Baths presented new challenges: “It’s a 100-year-old pool that, prior to closing 11 years ago, was not given the love and attention it needed. Our first question was, is it watertight?”

The answer turned out to be no. “We were surprised how good it was in the circumstances, but it did leak considerably.”

The pool has now been flooded with chemical sealant and regrouted. A new pump, filtration system and heating have been installed. This was crucial. “There has been no heating in this building for 11 years. Now we have to keep the water and temperature up so we do not get condensation on our delicate and valuable electronic kit,” Millar said. NTS’s investment for Lifeguard has fast-forwarded the current stage of the Baths’ reincarnation. The building’s future has been in doubt since March 2001 when four people from the Save Our Pool group chained themselves to the changing cubicles and refused to leave. They were removed by sheriff’s officers in August but pickets remained and the campaign continued.

Save Our Pool eventually became the Govanhill Baths Community Trust and evolved into a broader-based organisation that envisaged the building – at its height it had three separate pools, public baths, a steamie, Turkish bath and  sauna – as a much wider-reaching facility for an area which has 10.8 per cent unemployment and 22.8 per cent of the population classed as “economically inactive”.

The toddler pool will remain in use, although it won’t immediately be open to the public every day. Within the next 18 months the multi-million-pound programme of work funded by the Big Lottery and Historic Scotland will see what used to be the ladies’ pool reopen, the upper floor, which once housed public baths, become a gym and the old changing rooms turn into a fully-equipped art suite. There will also be a community cafe and roof garden.