SUMMER in Glasgow is incomplete without Bard in the Botanics. Celebrating its 25th anniversary, the Bard team have programmed a “Lovers and Madmen” season of Twelfth Night, Othello, Jane Austen’s Emma and John Webster’s 17th-century The Duchess of Malfi.
With no real funding from Creative Scotland, Bard in the Botanics took a risk with Scotland and its dodgy summers in 2002. The founder, American Scott Palmer, returned to the US after two years, though according to current artistic director Gordon Barr, he “still misses us to this day”. Barr and his associate director, Jennifer Dick, boast a long association with Bard in the Botanics, and continue to provide success in the Botanics – despite the weather..
We caught up with Barr, looking remarkably fresh despite being oxter deep as their Shakespeares have launched, with rehearsals under way for their other two shows. We began with a chat about weather challenges as Barr reminisced about one of his first shows in the “old Kibble Palace before they rebuilt it”.
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We had to cancel the show because it was raining inside! We’ve had some tough times, bad summers, in terms of weather and the financial impact – 2007 we hit a point briefly where we couldn’t quite pay our bills,” said Barr.
It was quickly solved by “a bit of fundraising, support from our board and smart thinking.” Nevertheless, Barr “never really thought I can’t do this anymore”.
He is quick to credit their team, especially the “production team and stage management who have the hardest jobs in theatre”.
“Every year we liken it to childbirth: you forget the pain of it.”
The pain is helped by the symbiotic relationship they have with their audiences – fundraising during Covid and being wholly dependent upon box office makes it vital. When it comes to choices over seasons, however, Barr admitted that principally, “seasons are always built up from things that we’re passionate about and that in turn leads to better productions; never doing something for box ticking”.
Returning to Othello was something Barr was keen to do, as it clearly resonates with our current times, as he explained describing Othello’s principal villain, Iago: “This white man approaching middle age, life not turning out the way he wants, looking around for someone to blame, to destroy, over that personal feeling of dissatisfaction and failure – we hear those men all the time, ironically utilised by people fully privileged, nothing wrong with their lives.
“There are certain plays at times feeling very close to where we are.”
But how did they pair tragic Othello with the hilarious Twelfth Night?
“In celebrating our 25 years of doing Shakespeare, let’s celebrate some of his best writing and work, giving audiences a range of experiences: dramatic intensity in Othello, rich joy, love and laughter in Twelfth Night.
“Othello is a phenomenal piece of writing, and Twelfth Night, probably his best-written comedy. Twelfth Night has such a richness about it; this vein of melancholy through it this absolute joyous return to life.”
They are coupled with “something completely different with Emma, intensity again in The Duchess of Malfi, very different from Othello, older, stranger, more excessive”.
Keeping one eye literally on his audiences, Barr includes a strong visual element as, “more often than not, our Shakespeare productions are modern dress”.
“When you get modern dress, you can tell stories that visually we recognise, [like] the class difference between Desdemona and Emelia [in Othello]. It feels right to look at that extra layer of our world through his writing.”
During the pandemic, flatmates Barr and Dick had “time to think”.
A catalyst about where they wanted the company to go in its third decade, they decided to “expand the stories that we could offer an audience”.
As they are not a regularly funded Creative Scotland company, Barr does not have the typical “amount of administrative staff built into the organisation”, as Barr would rather “invest in artists”.
Having embraced this “new challenge, to walk into a rehearsal room and work out what Ibsen needs, that’s different from Shakespeare or what is the style we want to do a Jane Austen performance,” they launched their very first tour in 2026 – their award-winning Euripides’ Medea, adapted by Kathy McLean and starring Nicole Cooper.
“We started talking about Medea prior to the pandemic and came about in a conversation between myself and Kathy [McLean] after Nicole [Cooper] had played Hamlet. It’s provided us with an opportunity to explore new territory, and that has been invigorating.”
That connection with artists is very important to Barr and his team, with an ensemble hired each season with some regular faces as “the longer you spend with Shakespeare, the richer you can create a performance”.
“Once actors have Shakespeare under their belt, they find other things much easier, because they’re used to exploring language, the scale of emotions,” Barr said.
He did confirm there are some Shakespeares they wouldn’t do.
“I don’t think there’s much for an audience to get out of Two Noble Kinsmen. We’ve no plans to do The Taming of the Shrew. I’m doing Othello, exploring misogyny and male attitudes to women. In Taming the Shrew, he seems to be endorsing them.”
There was also a move away from promenade performances of old, to keep things more static, due to the promenade “limiting our audience sizes”.
“That’s a big reason why the promenade work slipped away, because we couldn’t find enough spaces in the Botanics where we could accommodate the audience – a really positive reason to stop doing something,” Barr explained.
“For the moment, we’ll be remaining in our built stage and the capacity to have those larger audiences. It’s vital for a company that depends upon box office income.”
As for the future, Barr admits it’s hard “to avoid doing the big titles. You could only ever go a few years before another Midsummer Night’s Dream. Macbeth is looming on the horizon; there are so many high-profile productions of Macbeth.”
And as he signed off, Barr observed, “the popular ones are popular for a reason. They’re really good, so inevitably we will return to them all.”
You can catch (weather permitting) Twelfth Night and Othello until July 11, The Duchess of Malfi and Emma run from July 16 to August 1
