Where were we? Oh, yes. It was April 2018 and the Citizens Theatre was rounding off its in-house spring season with Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. It was a cracking show, with an explosive George Costigan as the patriarchal James Tyrone, marking yet another tough, intelligent production by artistic director Dominic Hill. The idea was the Glasgow theatre would then close for refurbishment (fix all those leaks where the rain got in, restore the crumbling walls, reconfigure the foyer) and spend a couple of years in exile up the road at Tramway. After that, it would return to a fancy new building in the autumn of 2020.

Was that wishful thinking? It’s rare for a big building project to run to schedule and this one was certainly big. The initial budget was £19.4m and promised the largest structural changes since the theatre was built in 1878. Indeed, it took less than a year for the budget to be revised upwards to £21.5m and the return date put back to summer 2021.

That was before the contractors had moved in. A building that originally opened as Her Majesty’s Theatre And Royal Opera House with a production of Ali Baba And The 40 Thieves (beset by technical problems of its own) was bound to offer a few snags along the way. And there were snags: who knew the safety curtain would be full of asbestos? Who knew it would have to be sliced apart before being taken out? Who knew the delays that would follow?

But that was not all. Cataclysmic forces were at play. Far beyond anyone’s control was the double whammy of Brexit and the pandemic. One created labour shortages. The other ground everything to a halt. Both sent costs spiralling. Throw in a rate of inflation that peaked at 11.1% in 2022 and you start to see how the two-year refit turned into seven and the budget more than doubled. The estimate is now a reported £40m.

All of which means when the Citizens finally reopens in September, we will be in a different era. The last time any of us saw a show there, Theresa May was prime minister, Keir Starmer was serving in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, Succession was yet to be broadcast, and a Chinese app called TikTok was just catching on. We had never used the words covid, deepfake or Lewis Capaldi, and we didn’t know who Greta Thunberg was.

You only have to look across the road through the big glass windows of the roomy new Citz foyer to see the changes. It is not just the people-friendly bus gate and cycle lane outside that are new. When the theatre closed, the rubble was still being cleared away from the demolished tower blocks of Laurieston. They, in turn, had replaced the terraces that had made the Gorbals one of the most densely populated areas in Europe. Now, housing has returned.

In 2025, the Citizens opens to find itself once again at the heart of a community. Residents of the 900 new red-brick apartments and town houses are eligible to see any show for £5 at the famously egalitarian theatre. They do not even have to go inside to see the first change. In recent times, the building’s yellow-brick exterior had merged blandly with the front of the procurator fiscal’s office next door. Now, thanks to architects Bennetts Associates, it has a frontage of its own: an imposing oblong block. Its black bricks contrast with six gleaming white stone statues breaking the horizontal line at the top. They were part of the 1878 façade and more recently stationed in the foyer. Below them, the theatre’s name is written in extravagantly large letters. This is a theatre that proclaims its presence.

It also trumpets its past. The statues (four Greek goddesses plus Burns and Shakespeare) are only the first reminder of what has gone before. Although the foyer has been rationalised into a single-level unified space, with no awkward corners or varying heights, it also retains a rough-and-ready character by exposing the sandstone of the original Victorian exterior. The walls bear the scars of bricked-up windows, joist holes, former staircases, and nearly 150 years’ worth of wear and tear.

‘It’s had an awful lot of TLC,’ says Graham Sutherland, head of production, proudly showing off the building. ‘But we didn’t want to tidy it up too much. The stonemasons were appalled, but we didn’t want it to feel like a church. As you go around the building, you can see the exposed stone, so it orientates you.’ The auditorium, of course, is all history, the place of so many theatrical memories, not least from the 33-year reign of Giles Havergal, Philip Prowse and Robert David MacDonald. From the early 1970s, this triumvirate established the company as a European powerhouse, the kind of place you could see Pierce Brosnan, Anita Dobson, Rupert Everett, David Hayman, Glenda Jackson, Ian McDiarmid, Gary Oldman, Alan Rickman, Tim Roth and Mark Rylance, often in neglected masterpieces.

‘The artistic heritage of the theatre is there all the time,’ says Dominic Hill, whose production of Small Acts Of Love, a Lockerbie drama by Frances Poet and Ricky Ross, will re-open the theatre in September as part of what he’s calling a homecoming festival. ‘We can’t replicate that heritage, but we can maintain the sense of it being a really important theatre in Glasgow that produces the most exciting work for everybody. We still have the great productions of the classics and the participation programme that has been there since the 70s. There is now also a greater emphasis on new work, new artists, and work that represents Glasgow. The variety of work is going to be greater than before.’ Further productions before the end of 2025 include Douglas Maxwell’s So Young, Kieran Hodgson’s Voice Of America and Barrowland Ballet’s The Gift.

Wisely, they have kept the auditorium as audiences remember it, save for improved wheelchair access and a refurbished upper circle that has increased total capacity from 451 to 654. Even keeping it the same was a major job: they had to dig up the floor of the stalls to install a natural ventilation system and upgrade the walls to improve fire safety. On the other side of the curtain, there is a new fly tower, a stage with a standard 1:24 rake and space enough for actors to make comfortable entrances from all corners. Out in the public corridors, there is yet more history: interior windows overlook the construction workshops, the dock door and a rare collection of Victorian stage machinery, all ropes and wooden fly wheels with the charm of a Heath Robinson cartoon. The interpretation areas are a key part of the redevelopment.

‘We’re building heritage work into lots of our homecoming activities,’ says Catrin Evans, director of the Participate community programme. ‘It isn’t just teaching people about the Citz, it’s about using this building as a starting point for teaching people about the Gorbals and the wider heritage here.’ Her work with local schools and other neighbourhood groups is one of the big beneficiaries of the refit. At her disposal is an upstairs rehearsal room and a second mixed-use participation space at ground level. She is delighted.

Just as exciting is a handsome new 150-seat studio theatre. Its inaugural production will be Close, devised by the Young Co with writer Jenny Knotts, and inspired by another slice of history: the experimental Close Theatre Club that ran here in the 1960s. ‘The studio changes everything,’ says Hill, hoping to fill some of the void left by The Arches and enable artists to create small-scale work. ‘There isn’t another space of this size in Glasgow. There is potentially a little touring circuit with us and the studios at Edinburgh Festival Theatre, Pitlochry and Inverness.’ The changes are not just about space, much of it reclaimed from empty areas that once belonged to the neighbouring Palace Theatre (demolished in 1977) and by extending a few metres on the building’s south side. The changes are also about flow. Gone is the hotchpotch warren of corridors and offices and, in its place, a more logical arrangement that should mean easier circulation and a sense of everyone sharing the same space.

‘The Citz does bring lots of different communities and lots of different shows together,’ says Evans. ‘Because of the flow of the building, I feel like people are going to be saying hello to each other and seeing what’s going on. It encourages it to feel animated.’

‘Seven years is a long time and so much has changed,’ says Hill. ‘What feels unique is you’ve got a theatre in the central belt that houses everything: a studio, workshops, rehearsal rooms and an extensive participation programme. As a focal point for artists and communities creating work, it feels exciting, new and unlike anywhere else. It feels like the national theatre of Glasgow!’

Small Acts Of Love, Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, Tuesday 9 September–Saturday 4 October; Close, Citizens Theatre Studio, Glasgow, Wednesday 8–Saturday 11 October; main picture: Mark Liddell.