The Herald

WITHIN THESE WALLS

Gary Oldman and Rupert Everett once trod its boards ... but did they realise what lay beneath them? As the secrets of the legendary Citizens' Theatre are exposed, Jackie McGlone enters the clandestine world of Scotland's hidden places

As the dusty trapdoor creaked open, David Leddy felt excitement rising in his throat. Brushing aside layers of cobwebs, he gazed down into the velvety darkness. The bright strip lights of the high-ceilinged room shone into the blackness, refracting shards of light from the contents of the room beneath the paint-encrusted floor. Through the gloom, he could see the skeletal remains of dozens of broken glass chandeliers.

"It was a thrilling sight," recalls Leddy, a 35-year-old writer, director and performer based in Glasgow. He always knew the city's renowned Citizens' Theatre had seen its fair share of drama, so when he was given a backstage pass by its artistic director Jeremy Raison, he prepared to discover places usually the exclusive preserve of stars such as Pierce Brosnan, Rupert Everett and Gary Oldman. It is doubtful, though, whether even they knew of the many subterranean secrets of the 130-year-old building in the Gorbals. "I've discovered places in this theatre - a Victorian gem if ever there was one - that even people who have worked here for years didn't know existed," Leddy continues.

On his first visit behind the scenes, he was enchanted by the fact he was visiting places usually out of bounds to audiences - never having performed at the Citizens', he had never been backstage. The experience inspired him to create a unique piece of promenade theatre based on the private life and the secret history of one of Glasgow's most iconic public buildings. Starring six leading Scottish actors including Cora Bissett and Alison Peebles, Sub Rosa - named after a legal term for secrecy - is set amid the corruption of a Victorian music hail. It leads an audience of 15 from the bowels of the building to the head-spinning heights of the gods, where rows of blood-red velvet seats are hidden behind a blue false wall and you can eyeball the plaster-cast, voluptuously naked goddesses around the proscenium. Built in 1878, this erstwhile music hall played to packed houses of 1200 people nightly - it was originally Her Majesty's Theatre and Royal Opera House before becoming the Royal Princess's Theatre. These days the Citz seats around 650.

Finds such as long-forgotten seats and a tiny, red and gold-painted crush bar in the balcony, where nobody has ordered an interval gin and tonic for decades, piqued Leddy's curiosity. He is fascinated by subterfuge and the recondite, and by how theatre tries to preserve its dark secrets of illusion and deception.

In previous site-specific shows Leddy, a recent recipient of two prestigious writing fellowships, including one from India's Global Arts Village, has allowed audiences to peer through the keyhole of his own flat in Broomhill Drive, Glasgow. So it was inevitable he would be drawn to the Citizens' clandestine world, driven by a desire to drag it out of the darkness into the light.

As we walk along a dimly lit corridor, its lone wall light speckled with dead insects, he explains how he began to unravel the legends of the Citizens'. "I've discovered a lion tamer was killed by his lion in dressing room No7, so all these stories were being fed to me as I walked around the building. What could I do but write a play that would take us into these hidden places? Honestly, if walls could talk..."

10th January 2009