The Statues

When I talk to people about the Citizens Theatre redevelopment one of the first questions I am always asked is, “What’s happening to the statues?” The stone statues of Burns, Shakespeare and the four muses, as well as the elephants and the nautch girls have been a vital component of the Citizens Theatre iconography for decades.

Up until the move out of the building, Burns and Shakespeare stood either side of the bar.

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And the four muses were either side of the main entrance in and out of the foyer.

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There were also four elephants on the same wall as the entrances to the main auditorium and upstairs were four ‘nautch girls’.

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The elephants and nautch girls were originally part of the interior of the Palace Theatre auditorium next door. The Palace, designed by Bertie Crewe who also designed the Pavillion in Glasgow was a lavish affair with an Indian theme.

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The six stone statues originally adorned the front of the building sitting on on top of a large columned frontage as part of a shared facade with the Palace Theatre and the Citizens Theatre. Both buildings, along with the tenements, were owned and developed by John Morrison who commissioned the shared façade.

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He commissioned the statues from John Mossman, a prolific sculptor in his day and a contemporary of Alexander ‘Greek’ Thompson as well as being a founding member of the Glasgow School of Art.

The columns actually came from a project for the City of Glasgow Bank on Ingram Street after alterations that were carried out by Campbell Douglas and Sellars; the architects of the Citizens. The columns had been commissioned from Mossman for the bank but in the end were not required and so they were repurposed for the front of the theatre.

Of the statues, Robert Burns and William Shakespeare are recognisable enough, but lots of people ask who the muses are and what each one represents. The answer to that is not as straightforward as it might appear.

The muses originate from Greek mythology and are mentioned as far back as Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad around 700BC. According to legend, they are the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne who gave the babies to Apollo and Nymph Eufime. They grew up with a tendency for the arts to which they dedicated their lives taught by the god Apollo himself.

Common depictions of the muses have changed throughout history but include: comedy, tragedy, history, lyric poetry, music and dancing, erotic poetry, epic poetry and rhetoric, astronomy, and sacred hymns and harmony. Given the variety of descriptions for each of these categories each our statues could belong to at least a couple of them.

After the building first opened as Her Majesty’s Theatre and Opera House in 1878 (as it was called at that time), an article in a newspaper called ‘The Era’, made mention of the following:

‘The frontage is in the Doric style, with a row of six fluted columns supporting an ornamental entablature, which is surmounted by six large figures. At the two extremities are capital statues of Shakespeare and Burns, the figures between them representing Tragedy, Comedy, Music, and Burlesque.‘

Based on this, we have always said they are Euterpe (Song and Poetry), Thalia (Comedy), Melpomene (Tragedy), and Terpischore (Dance). However, when you look at the typical attributes of those muses they are not a straightforward match.

The statues sat on top of the columns of the shared frontage between the Citizens Theatre and the Palace Theatre next door. The Close Theatre eventually sat in behind the columns at first floor. People often wrongly assume that the statues belonged to the Palace Theatre, but as you can see in the photo above, the original frontage was very much part of the Citizens (Princess’s Theatre as it was at that time).

I think part of this misconception is because the Citizens Theatre entrance eventually moved to the left and the frontage was taken down around the time that the Palace Theatre was demolished. Indeed, the statues were lucky to have survived at all.

On the 7th May, 1973 a fire broke out in the Close Theatre on the first floor completely destroying it, causing some damage to the adjacent Citizens Theatre and the Palace Bingo Hall (as it was known by then).

The Citizens suffered relatively minor smoke and water damage and reopened about a month later, but the close was completely destroyed. The columns remained as they were held up by steel joists that ran back into the rest of the building. The council put a temporary roof above the Citizens Theatre foyer and stalls bar so that it could carry on operating.

In the 1970’s, as was the case across a lot of Glasgow, wholesale clearance was taking place in the Gorbals, levelling the old tenements to replace them with high-rise buildings and motorways. Indeed, the city planned to demolish the Citizens Theatre to make way for an offshoot of the M8 with a proposed relocation of the theatre company into town. The plan was abandoned but not before the tenements and the Palace were already lost.

The tenements coming down would mean that the frontage would become unstable, and so it was condemned as well. It was reported in The Stage in July 1977 that the cost of demolishing the frontage was £30,000 but that an additional sum of £9500 was made available by the council to save the stone statues from the top of the building (no mean sum in 1977).

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The statues were taken away and stored in a council depot with a view to them coming back to the Citizens Theatre at some point in the future if they found the money to develop the building.

Not long after that, much to the horror of the Citizens Theatre staff, the Palace Theatre also started to be demolished. Clare Blenkinsop, the then General Manager of the Citizens Theatre, along with the Theatres Trust, managed to persuade them to stop work for long enough for some of the fixtures and fittings to be removed from the interior before they finished knocking it down.

And so the elephants and nautch girls came to the Citizens Theatre. A complete set also went to the Theatre Museum in London as well as a part of one side of the auditorium which they displayed (until it closed after which it went to the Victoria and Albert stores).

The stone statues went into storage with the council. Burns eventually made an appearance at the Tron Theatre in 1981 when the Glasgow Theatre Club (formed in 1978 to fill the gap in Glasgow after the Close Theatre burnt down) took over the old church at Trongate.

After a while the muses went back up at the front of the Citizens Theatre. Then in 1989, all six stone statues were reunited along with the elephants and the Nautch Girls in the Citizens Theatre’s newly created foyer spaces where they were a feature for almost thirty years.

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In 2019, before we started disassembling and moving the statues they were photographed, and also 3D scanned, so that we had a proper three-dimensional record of them in case anything were to happen to them in transit or for something to go wrong with the restoration.

(Even on this lower resolution model you can see a lot of detail. If you zoom in on the join halfway up you can see how badly damaged and repaired the statue has been.)

The 3D scans of the statues could also be taken into the design software by the architects, Bennetts Asssociates, to help visualise how they might look on the outside of the new building.

We also worked with Keith Brown, a student prop maker at RCS at that time, to 3D print the statues to see what might be possible with them. Below are the 3D printed statues lined up on a desk in the office and then us having a play with some lighting options on them.

After we had vacated the building, sculptor David J Mitchell and his team, had to carefully remove the statues to take them away to his workshop to be able to start work on the restoration.

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Once they were removed from the Citizens Theatre, they were transported to David Mitchell’s studio space in Bellshill.

The plasterwork statues required some repairs and strengthening works (particularly the tusks which had taken a beating from children swinging on them over the years!)

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They also needed to be primed and then given a new coat of gold paint ready for when they come back into the new foyer.

They were then boxed up and shipped off to temporary storage with Scottish Opera who are looking after them for us until we are back in the building.

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The work that was required on the stone statues was a lot more involved. They had suffered all sorts of damage that needed to be remedied by the sculptor. When they were previously on the outside of the building they had suffered from pollution and weathering. They had also been coated in white paint when they were out there that was now flaking off but had eaten into and damaged the surface of the sandstone. Various bits of stonework had been broken off, some of which had been diligently kept by the staff at the theatre, but others completely lost over the years. Other parts were broken but still hanging on that would need to be securely fixed. There was also damage and gaps that had been crudely filled with an inappropriate mortar that would need to be gently raggled out and repaired.

Other statues had bits that had gone missing completely, but that we had photographic records of, which helped inform new components of the sculpture that David could make and incorporate.

In 1977, the hand and mask were still attached to Thalia, the muse of Comedy, but it had gone missing by the time she got to the Citizens Theatre in 1989. The sculptor uses the photographic record to create a replica.

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Below is a link to a BBC short film on sculptor David J Mitchell that talks about his journey as an artist and also touches on the work he did here on the Citizens Theatre Statues

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p090v2qg/loop-series-4-the-art-of-sculpture

Throughout the design process the architects have had the statues in various different places within the design.

To begin with we had assumed they would go back inside the building, then for a brief spell they were proposed to go behind the windows and on a balcony at first floor above the front doors. But it feels appropriate, that at a time when the rest of Gorbals is being significantly regenerated with new buildings of scale all around us that the statues once again take their place back on the top of the new building as a dramatic new focal point for Gorbals Street.

Whilst they have been in the studio the design team have done a lot of work figuring out how they will sit on the outside of the building; both structurally and aesthetically.

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Because of their return to the outdoors. and following advice from a specialist stone conservator within Historic Environment Scotland’s Conservation team, David also applied a specialist Keim coating to prevent any future damage from weathering . After that they were ready to get transported back to the construction site.

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The statues were wrapped in plastic for some short term weather protection but mainly to stop them gathering any dust and debris once they arrive back on the construction site. They were carefully forklifted out of the workshop and on to the truck.

The statues are then secured with ratchet straps on to the truck in much the same way they were when they left the Citizens Theatre in 1977.

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Short video of the statues on the move

The statues are now back on site in what was the car-park of the Citizens Theatre. In these photos you can see how much the street is changing with the newly restored and refurbished Linen Bank (the only remaining tenement on Gorbals Street) and the newly built flats adjacent. By the time our redevelopment is finished the street will have been transformed.

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I am really looking forward to the day when these are craned up on to the front of the new building.