Gateways from the past to the future

Ian Brown

The Gateway Theatre and the Company that occupied it from 1953 until 1965 are remarkably under-researched. While the Edinburgh Gateway Company compiled in 1965 as an envoi to its twelve seasons a book of vivid memoirs, photographs and production records under the title, The Twelve Seasons of the Edinburgh Gateway Company: 1953-1965, this book has been out of print for many years. No other substantial research into either the company or theatre has been published, although founding Company member, Michael Elder, has recently had a book of reminiscences published. It is not that the Gateway Company and Theatre are forgotten or their influence denied. It seems to be rather that, in the rush of professional creative activity in, and new scholarship addressing, Scottish theatre in the last thirty years, competing demands have scarcely left room to address in any detail the work of such a significant company. Further, the importance of the Gateway Theatre is often seen entirely in terms of its role as accommodating the work of the Company between 1953 and 1965. As a result, the building's history, the important work developed at the Gateway between its being so named in 1946 and the launch of the Company in 1953 or the role of key figures in the development of the company and building have also been largely neglected.

This book, then, seeks to begin to fill such lacunae. It provides a brief history of both the building and the Company until the date of the Company's serendipitous transition into the present Royal Lyceum Theatre Company. In so doing, it provides a context for both by relating them to contemporary attitudes to theatre. In this, it specifically addresses the relationship of the Church of Scotland — the building's owner from 1946 until it was sold to Scottish Television in 1968 — to contemporary theatre and, to some extent, the arts in general. It considers the importance of such key figures as Sadie Aitken (1905–85) and Robert Kemp (1908–1967), not only in the context of the Gateway, but in the wider context of their work. In short, while it does not seek to replicate such general contextualising material as is available concerning the Scottish repertory system, it sets the Gateway Theatre and Company in the context of a variety of theatrical and dramatic developments, particularly in the period from 1946 until 1965. In so doing, it shows the building, the company and their leading figures to have had a wide-ranging influence beyond the repertory theatre system itself and particularly in contributing to the development of the vision of theatre now current in Scotland.

It is idle, of course, to pretend that the Gateway Theatre Company's work during its twelve years of existence was always admirable. Donald Smith talks of

a well-nigh disastrous season in 1960-61 [when] the Gateway managed to lose its home audience and manifest the ethos of the, by now, stale 1950s by producing Robert Kemp's less-than-inspired Master John Knox and Bjornson's [sic] Mary Stuart in Scotland at the Edinburgh Festival.

He goes on in the passage immediately following:

The audience situation was stabilised in the next year but the floreat of the mid 1950s, when the Gateway was the focus of a school of Scottish dramatists, including Robert McLellan, Alexander Reid and Robert Kemp was never recovered. In 1965, the Gateway Company was absorbed into the larger enterprise of Edinburgh's new Civic Theatre Company at the Royal Lyceum.

In other words, the Gateway Theatre Company should not be seen with a halo. It had the highs and lows that mark the history of any theatre company of any duration. It is, nonetheless, remembered with much affection and nostalgia. This may in part arise from the fact, in Randall Stevenson's words, that

What openings did exist for Scottish work at the time [the 1950s and much of the 1960s, drab times for Scottish theatre] were to be found at the Citizens', which staged some Scottish material, and at the Gateway Theatre in Edinburgh.

The Gateway has, then, with its sister theatre in Glasgow, a key role in the development of the modern Scottish theatre. As Donald Smith observes, reviewing the programmes of the early 1950s, 'Perth, Pitlochry, the Byre, in its professional seasons, and Dundee were more inclined to the English repertory pattern'. In contradistinction, he then notes that 'the mix does vary significantly in emphasis at the Citizens', perhaps the theatre most committed to Scottish work at this period, followed by the Gateway'. The emphasis on Scottish work may have been made more possible by the fact that both Citizens' and Gateway produced in cities where the existence of other theatres allowed them to focus more on new writing. The producing theatres in other locations were the sole suppliers of all forms of professional theatre for their communities and so are likely, as is the case in such theatres even today, to have felt the need to provide more general repertoires.

The repertoires of the Citizens' and the Gateway were in many ways similar during the period 1953–1965. Michael Coveney typifies that of the Citizens' in this period as 'a mixed repertoire of new Scottish plays and standard classics during the 1950s', while the 1950s and 1960s were 'two decades of solid rather than spectacular programming'. Coveney's assertions offer an example of a sometime prevailing view of the work of the Citizens' and, by extension, the Gateway during this period as being somehow of steady worthiness rather than special interest. While Coveney's sense of the balance of the programmes seems fair, his judgement of its quality may be affected by his purpose, which he himself makes quite clear, of praising the work of the Citizens' under the directorship of Giles Havergal, Philip Prowse and Robert David MacDonald. In doing so, he may be seen to slight the work of the fifties and sixties by promoting a myth of pre-Havergal gloom.

Tony Paterson, for some years in the sixties Literary Manager at the Citizens', has explored this myth and the related one that there was little of interest to be seen at the Citizens' between Bridie's departure in 1951 and Havergal's arrival in 1969, largely refuting them both. In fact, during this period, there was much of interest to be seen, although in the fifties and sixties there were indeed slack periods of programming, as in any decade. In the years before Havergal's arrival, in particular, there was some outstanding work to be seen at the Citizens'. In 1964, for example, John Arden's Armstrong's Last Goodnight was premièred during the period of Iain Cuthberston's artistic directorship, which also included an innovative 1963 production of Pirandello's Henry IV. Later, Michael Blakemore and Michael Meacham produced such landmark productions as the 1967 première of A Day in...