“Small Acts of Love”, Citizens Theatre
Mark Brown in Glasgow
13 September 2025
Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre has been closed for major redevelopment work, not for the planned two years, but for an extraordinary seven. The playhouse – which sits in the Gorbals community on the south bank of the River Clyde – is arguably Scotland’s most important repertory theatre, and unarguably its most influential. Consequently, its long period of closure – which is only partially explained by the Covid-19 pandemic – has had a devastating impact on the culture of Glasgow and Scotland more broadly.
The splendidly reconstructed theatre reopened to the public on August 23, the very day on which – in a dreadfully painful coincidence – the legendary director and actor Giles Havergal died. Havergal – who was, famously, artistic director of “the Citz” between 1969 and 2,003 – was due to attend last night’s press performance of Small Acts of Love, the production with which the great Glasgow theatre announces its return.
The play is a new work about the aftermath of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish border town of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988. Boasting a script by Frances Poet, and music and lyrics by Ricky Ross of Deacon Blue fame, it is staged by Dominic Hill who is the acclaimed artistic director at the venue. The Citizens and the National Theatre of Scotland are co-producers.
The politics of the Lockerbie bombing are complex and murky. Few people doubt that the bombing of the American airliner – which killed all 259 on board the flight and 11 people in the small town below – was retaliation for the killing of all 290 people onboard Iran Air Flight 655 which had been brought down by the US warship the USS Vincennes on 3 July 1988.
The guilt of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi – the Libyan intelligence officer who spent eight years in a Scottish jail for the bombing – was questioned by many people. These ranged from Dr. Jim Swire (whose 23-year-old daughter, Flora, died on the Pan Am flight) to Nelson Mandela (who famously addressed the media at HMP Barlinnie in Glasgow and proclaimed that its best-known inmate, al-Megrahi, was innocent).
It is perfectly reasonable that Poet’s play doesn’t address the thorny, still contested politics around the Lockerbie bombing. Giving proper consideration to such issues would have prevented her drama from pursuing its important purpose, which is honouring the dead and reflecting on the pain and solidarity of the loved ones of the deceased. That said, the failure to at least reference the fatal American attack on the Iranian airliner is a questionable omission.
What Poet, Ross and Hill have created is, for the most part, a sensitive meditation on grief and the inevitably imperfect and incomplete nature of healing. A superb, 14-strong cast and a five-piece band take us into moments from the excited travels in Europe of American students prior to their boarding of the flight. Ross’s songs are often, and appropriately, understated and always reflective of the sympathetic tone of a script that takes its inspiration from interviews with loved ones of those who died.
If the piece is heavy both with mourning and the titular “small acts of love” that attend it, it does have occasional moments of dramatic tension. Some of these come in the relationship between young Claire Dorrance (portrayed excellently by Holly Howden Gilchrist) and her father, police officer Colin Dorrance (Ewan Donald on affecting form).
The young woman is preparing to be Lockerbie’s representative in a commemorative project run by Syracuse University in New York state (which lost a number of its students over Lockerbie). The scenes in which she persuades her reluctant father to open up about his experiences in the days after the bombing are among the play’s strongest.
Both script and score offer what the writer of the Nazi Holocaust Primo Levi called – in a very different context – “moments of reprieve”. Nevertheless, the subject matter makes it almost inevitable that – for all its reflections on touching instances of care and hope – Small Acts of Love is overwhelmingly a work of the deepest sadness.
Until October 4: https://citz.co.uk
