Rupert Everett has some harsh words for the SNP government’s approach to arts funding, though his beef is more about the what than the how much – and he reserves his scorn for the woman he calls “the witch”, former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.

Speaking to The Herald ahead of his appearance at the Boswell Book Festival where he was promoting his new(-ish) book of short stories, Everett zeroed in on his time in Glasgow in the late 1980s and in particular a spell at the Citizens Theatre, where the quality of the work bowled him over, the drive of the people running the place and the intellectual expansiveness of what was staged there.

My words, by the way, not his. What he said is this: “It was a European theatre in the same vein as Peter Stein, Pina Bausch. It was a national European theatre. And unlike those theatres, it never ran at a loss. It presented an uncompromising array of work to people that it never patronised… It’s how I imagine the relationship with the audience must have been in the Restoration, in a way. It was a collaborative thing between the audience. A very vocal audience. It was literally like going into Aladdin’s cave, going into the Citizens.”

Then along came “the witch” – this is a quarter of a century after he graced the Dear Green Place, remember – and suddenly “everything changed in Scottish arts… everything had to be about being Scottish.”

Now I used to go to the Citz as a schoolboy in the period Everett was acting there, and maybe even saw him........

© Herald Scotland