An Unexpected ‘City of Culture’ Emerges in Scotland

On-stage at the Citizens’ Theater, Friedrich Schiller’s 1801 play “Joan of Arc” enthralls audiences who have paid about $5 a seat to see a little-known classic of the German theater.

Across town at the Theater Royal, the Scottish Opera performs the rarely seen three-act version of Alban Berg’s 1937 opera, “Lulu.” Meanwhile, the Burrell Collection attracts visitors to its wide range of paintings, stained glass and Oriental art.

Once in the news for its crime and grime, Glasgow now makes happier headlines in the world of culture.

In 1990, Scotland’s largest city becomes the first one in the United Kingdom to be designated a European City of Culture, following such places as Athens, Florence, Amsterdam, West Berlin and Paris.

Glaswegians have made cultural waves before--from film director Bill Forsyth (“Local Hero,” “Gregory’s Girl,” “Comfort and Joy” and “Housekeeping”) to the rock group The Jesus and Mary Chain. Now, the city itself merits attention as a creative locus too often ignored.

“We knew Glasgow was a cultural capital; all we had to do was convince others of that,” said Robert Gray, the city’s Lord Provost.

Glasgow won the European culture crown over such competitors as Bath, the ancient English spa town; the Welsh cities of Cardiff and Swansea; and Edinburgh, Glasgow’s Scottish neighbor.

The honor is raising morale in a once-proud industrial city buffeted by 22 percent unemployment and a population shrinkage in the last decade from 799,000 to 718,000.

“It’s changing the image of the city,” said Bob Palmer, festival director of the European City of Culture.

Glasgow’s reputation as the “razor gang city,” rife with social and economic ills, is being cleaned up along with the strawberry-colored sandstone of its buildings.

Budgeted at $28 million, the yearlong event is expected to bring 2 million visitors and up to $125 million to the city.

“Glasgow is now on the map,” said Jean McFadden, who has been chairwoman of Glasgow’s annual arts festival, Mayfest, since its beginning in 1983. “People are now more aware of what they have.”

While Edinburgh holds its international arts festival every August, the Glasgow Mayfest has expanded over five years from a two-week event budgeted at $150,000 to a three-week binge that, in 1988, should cost about $1.3 million. Throughout the year, Glasgow is home to Scotland’s national orchestra, opera and ballet companies, as well as to such theaters as the Citizens’ and the Tron, also cited among the best in Britain.

Its seven museums and galleries pay homage both to its imposing architectural past and its burgeoning artistic present.

Stephen Campbell, Peter Howson and Adrian Wiszniewski have flown the flag for young Glaswegian painters in exhibitions in New York. All three graduated from the Glasgow School of Art, whose architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, is himself at last being acknowledged as a genuine design innovator and art nouveau exponent almost 60 years after his death in 1928.

Apart from Mackintosh, whose legacy is honored throughout the city, art lovers in Glasgow have focused on the Burrell Collection, which houses the holdings of Sir William Burrell, a Scottish shipowner who died in 1958 at age 96.

Paul Bassett, an administrator at the Citizens’ Theater, said the 1983 opening of the Burrell, gave the city a boost.

Bassett, a 35-year-old Englishman, said he was surprised at Glasgow’s cultural vitality when he moved there from England in 1979. Since then, he has noted the city’s tremendous leap forward.

“You see a Glasgow person in England say, ‘Why would you want to live up there?’ and you, with your English accent, say, ‘It’s a jolly good place to be,’ ” he said.

Last year, with 8,000 objects spread over two floors in a laminated timber building, the Burrell had 754,540 visitors, second only to the Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum, which had 783,744 visitors last year.

The Citizens’ Theater has seen attendance rise over 10 years from 60 percent to 80 percent of capacity in the 641-seat playhouse located in the Gorbals, once one of Europe’s worst slums.

Encompassing an ambitious range of classic texts, from German writers such as Schiller and Goethe to France’s Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Genet, the Citizens’ Theater regularly gets national press attention for its uncompromising, boldly designed work.

Philip Prowse, one of its three artistic directors, has gone on to direct opera and theater in London.

Rupert Everett and Gary Oldman, actors who found renown in movies such as “Dance With a Stranger” and “Prick Up Your Ears,” appeared there early in their careers in Marcel Proust’s “A Waste of Time” and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Rosenkavalier,” among others.