The Gallowgate has been three weeks from closing for nineteen years. It seats four hundred and sells about ninety. The boiler is older than the artistic director and considerably more reliable. What keeps it open is a covenant written into the building's lease in 1911: the Gallowgate must stage a full season every year or the freehold reverts to the city. So it stages a season. Every year. With whoever will work for what it pays. The result is a company where the leads are hired for the poster and the understudies are hired because they can actually do it — and where everyone, on both sides of that line, has to be pleasant to each other for eleven months at a stretch. The theatre runs on that politeness the way it runs on the boiler: loudly, at pressure, and never quite safely.