“Very simply, we wanted to tour our best work”.
Gordon Barr is not in the business of serving up birthday cake. As Bard in the Botanics marks its 25th anniversary, the Artistic Director has bypassed celebratory fluff in favour of infanticide, betrayal, and exile.
Kathy McKean’s searing adaptation of Euripides’ Medea—which secured Best Production and an Outstanding Performance award for Nicole Cooper at the 2022 Critics’ Awards for Theatre in Scotland (CATS)—is currently carving a path across the country. Hitting The Gaiety in Ayr tonight, this formidable piece of theatre proves that a quarter-century milestone demands a statement of intent.
Replicating a Glasshouse Intimacy
The original 2022 run drew its suffocating tension from its venue: Glasgow’s Kibble Palace, a literal glasshouse that forced audiences into uncomfortably close proximity with a demigoddess on the edge. Transporting that specific, hothouse dread to proscenium arches and civic halls poses an immediate mechanical challenge.
“The Kibble Palace is a unique environment which can’t be replicated,” Barr concedes. The physical distance of a traditional auditorium, however, does not offer audiences a safe retreat. The psychological architecture of the production prevents it. “In Kathy McKean’s script, Medea needs the audience,” Barr notes, rendering the physical gap between stage and stalls irrelevant.
“We have worked hard to explore how and when Medea can make contact with the audience so that they remain an integral part of the production and aren’t allowed to fully retreat ‘behind the footlights’ and become passive observers of Medea’s story,” he explains. “That connection is in the script and, in Nicole Cooper, we are lucky enough to have a performer who can connect with someone sitting in the back row of the Traverse Theatre as directly as she can with someone sitting 3 feet away from her in Dunoon Burgh Hall”.
“We have worked hard to explore how and when Medea can make contact with the audience so that they remain an integral part of the production and aren’t allowed to fully retreat ‘behind the footlights’ …”
The company is uniquely equipped for this spatial whiplash. Years of outdoor summer shows have acted as a rigorous training ground. Those performances are “the epitome of ‘different every night’,” Barr observes, requiring actors to be constantly “playing with and feeding off the audience, responding to external factors (like the weather or the sound of a concert over at Hampden drifting across the city)”.
A Masterclass in Restraint
The temptation for any director revisiting a major success is to over-engineer it, finding a radical new angle to justify a remount. Barr and his company flatly refused. Commissioned in 2019 and delayed until 2022 by the pandemic, the script had already undergone years of rigorous development before its premiere.
“We wanted to avoid tinkering for the sake of ‘doing something’,” Barr states. In fact, only two lines of dialogue have been altered for this 2026 national tour. The creative team has instead relied on the natural maturation of the cast—which sees the return of Johnny Panchaud as Jason, Alan Steele as Creon, and Isabelle Joss as the Nurse—to mine new depths.
“We’ve all changed in a myriad of little ways in the past 3 and a half years since we first staged Medea and everyone – but particularly Nicole – has been able to look at the text again from the perspective of who they are now,” he says. “We all agree that the performances and the relationships feel deeper and even more rooted than previously”.
The success of the text is not a fluke. The alchemy between company and playwright is proven; they teamed up two years later for Hedda Gabler, scooping another CATS Best Production Award in 2024. Barr is quick to deflect credit for the current tour’s power. “It sounds egotistical for the director to say that [Medea is a brilliant piece of work] – but while I’m proud of my work on this show, it is Kathy’s script and the performances, led by Nicole Cooper, which I think are the outstanding elements of this show,” he admits.
Greek Tragedy in a Fractured 2026
McKean’s script is highly regarded for balancing the domestic with the epic, a duality the cast must continually calibrate whether playing the grandeur of Eden Court or the tight confines of the Mull Theatre. “We are blessed with a script that beautifully balances the domestic and the epic within its language – so as long as we’re doing justice to the text, the audience will experience all aspects of Medea, regardless of the space in which they are watching her story,” Barr observes.
The socio-political undercurrent of the play bites particularly hard right now. Cooper’s central performance highlights Medea’s precarious status as a foreigner in Corinth, a theme carrying a grim, intensified weight in the current global climate.
“I think the universal relevance of Medea’s ‘otherness’ is even more apparent now than it was in 2022,” Barr asserts. “When King Creon tells her she and her children are banished from Corinth and that ‘those who come after me won’t use words’ – we have very clear images of what that means and would look like coming out of America in recent months in a very frightening way”.
The production refuses to let audiences off the hook. “This version of Medea encourages us to think about our own attitudes to Medea as an outsider – do we blame her for ‘not fitting in’ or do we feel empathy with someone who can never be ‘one of us’,” he adds. “As we face questions globally of who gets to ‘belong’ in a society, that resonates the same for people in Wick, Glasgow or Ayr”.
Fixing Shakespeare and the Greek Problem
Barr is remarkably unsentimental about the classical canon, a refreshing trait for the head of a company built on it. He openly admits he does not hold a “slavish adoration” for Shakespeare.
“Let’s face it, there are some of Shakespeare’s plays which aren’t so brilliant and others where the existence of a dramaturg might have been useful to him!” he remarks. He advocates for active intervention, noting that “a judicious bit of editing or a bold rewrite is sometimes the best way” to make historical texts speak to modern crowds.
This pragmatic approach extends to Greek tragedy. Barr points out his historic hesitations with the genre, specifically the way its exciting stories “are often delivered as long, monolithic speeches which can distance an audience”. McKean is the antidote. Her writing, he notes, “absolutely can contain the epic that Greek drama requires but rip your heart out emotionally at the same time”.
Building an Independent Powerhouse
This ambitious, Creative Scotland-funded circuit marks Bard in the Botanics’ first major tour since 2015. The eleven-year drought was a matter of survival and strategy. The company “focused on building our summer work – especially in the wake of the pandemic and the many financial crises that have been facing the arts and society in general since that point,” Barr explains.
Mounting five shows annually without core state funding is “a deliberate choice on our part,” making them one of Scotland’s largest independent producers. Yet, the logistical reality of getting a show on the road remains brutal. “It has taken us since 2022 to secure the funding and then to organise this tour,” Barr reveals. While several other recent productions reflect who the company is today, the massive funding lag means those will have to wait to form the basis of “future tours”.
“Let’s face it, there are some of Shakespeare’s plays which aren’t so brilliant and others where the existence of a dramaturg might have been useful to him!”
Despite their heavy reputation, the company’s output is not exclusively tragic. Barr points out that musical theatre and pantomime were his “first theatrical love”. He has subsequently “been able to build that one into Bard’s life annually” with the Byre Theatre panto. The repertoire also includes “exquisite pieces of writing” like Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
Looking forward, Barr hopes this anniversary run “will be a gateway for us to work more closely with venues and partner companies to bring more classical theatre to audiences across the country”. Standing at the 25-year mark, the director recognises the sheer scale of what has been built.
“I’ve built my version of how I want classical theatre to speak to audiences in the 21st century,” Barr states. “As we reach the milestone of 25 years of Bard in the Botanics, I have realised that this is and will forever be my life’s work – my legacy to Scottish theatre and audiences”.
The journey from a scrappy start to a major national tour was unexpected, yet entirely earned.
“The version of me pouring drinks in 2001 might not have expected to work with Shakespeare for the next quarter of a century – but the version of me now wouldn’t change a thing”.
Featured Image: Nicole Cooper as Medea. Pic by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan
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