GLASGOW’S Tron Theatre is gearing up for a goodbye. Artistic director Andy Arnold is saying cheerio with a show built on a classic. It is, however, nae ordinary classic.

Nae Expectations opened last week and runs until November 4. With a typical Scots twist on a glass half-full kind of tale, it promises to be a nod to the half-empty glasses of our current economic plight.

Written by Gary McNair and with a stellar cast including Gavin Jon Wright as Pip, Karen Dunbar as the extraordinarily strange Miss Havisham and Gerry Mulgrew as escaped convict and one of Pip’s many tormentors, Abel Magwitch, it could be argued that wur expectations are heightened.

I caught up with Mulgrew, the artistic director of Communicado, the actors’ company he formed in the 1980s.

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He lamented the departure of Arnold, a respected colleague, saying “When Andy asked me, I jumped at the chance to be in this. His last production at the Tron? It’s a bit of an end of an era because he has been a mainstay of Scottish theatre. He asked me ages ago and I thought, I can’t say no. It’s a bit of a historic occasion.”

Mulgrew’s association with Arnold stretches way back to: “When he was running the Theatre Workshop in Edinburgh in the late 70s. That’s when we met and Communicado was getting off the ground. He has been a fantastic support, with his enthusiasm and knowledge of the scene. I think he’ll be missed. I’ll certainly miss him because he has always been a great support to me.”

Of the show that will see out Arnold’s tenure, Mulgrew was equally enthusiastic: “It’s great fun. I am looking forward to seeing how it plays out with an audience – Great Expectations in Glaswegian!

“It’s very gallus. It has a political edge to it, which is good. It’s still basically Dickens, because he was satirising what he thought was rotten in his own society. I think we have been able to transfer that.”

That transfer includes a lesson for us all: “The story is a solid morality play, which is what I like about Dickens. He wasn’t just entertaining, he wanted to make a point about corruption.

“You can see the character of Pip is based upon himself and his own pretty awful upbringing. He had to go and work in a factory at the age of 12 when his father was put in a debtors’ prison. For a young lad the shame and the expectation of all that made him a unique voice. I hope people will enjoy the underlying Dickens, the story and the Glaswegian.”

Dickens’s persona is always writ large on his work as Mulgrew was able to explore: “He would have been an actor if he hadn’t been a novelist. He was always performing in amateur productions and went on tours where he dramatised the juicy bits from his own novels and acted all the parts. He became quite famous for doing that.”

Mulgrew returned to the loss of Arnold at the helm of the Tron. They have previously run both the Theatre Workshop and The Arches: “I think it will be a big, big loss, because we need people who have knowledge of what has happened in the past as well as what is happening in the present.

“A lot can be brought to the scene by sympathy with what is happening now and what brought that to pass. Andy has always been a bit of a risk taker, an entertainer, but is also eminently sensible. He knows he has to get people to come along, so he needs to find things which will appeal to people. But at the same time, he sees his role, I think, as being somewhere that can allow experiment and new things to happen, to support our young artists without whom there is no future. If something doesn’t work, everybody learns from it.”

Part of that learning is, of course, running a building, and Arnold has done that successfully: “There is a real difficulty in running buildings – it’s a skill in itself. What you put in it is a different matter and it is great that there is a place like this in Glasgow.”

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There are wider issues facing Scottish theatre, as Mulgrew delved into: “If there is going to be a 10% cut to Creative Scotland it means a 10% cut to the theatre industry, which is already cut to the bone.

If that does happen maybe places such as the Tron or the Traverse will be under pressure to close, which is dreadful.”

Making a noise about these cuts could feel, according to Mulgrew, dangerous: “It often seems you have to be careful about complaining because people say, ‘what are you complaining about, you’re an actor – you’re subsidised!’ I think the public don’t realise what they’ve got.

“Of course, as professionals you make it look simple. OK, David Mamet would say who asked you and nobody asked you. We just decided to do it.

“I think things have changed in terms of priority and am not sure there is the same level of support for live theatre, which is what I have been involved in all my life. Understanding of and dialogue between theatres, makers and the funding body – I don’t know if that’s the same.”

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Of hope for a change in the theatrical landscape, Mulgrew reminisces and ponders one surprising outcome of current problems and issues: “When they opened the Playboy of the Western World in Dublin there were riots there because somebody mentioned the word shift, talking about women’s shifts and that caused moral outrage.

“Half the audience were fighting the other half. It’s no bad thing to express yourself like that sometimes. There aren’t many riots these days in theatres. It’s a pity because I think it’s good to have a good riot.”

But for now Mulgrew and the cast would settle for riotous laughter.