“What a dump!”, as Bette Davis might have said. But what a treasured, beloved dump it was, too: the Bush Theatre is, of course, finally bowing out of its old premises above the pub on the corner of Shepherd’s Bush Green, after a 39 year residency that has established it as one of the most important centres of new writing in British theatre, offering early tasters of the work of some of the biggest names in contemporary playwrighting, from Jonathan Harvey and Dennis Kelly to Conor McPherson, Enda Walsh, Joe Penhall, Mike Bartlett, Simon Stephens and Steve Thompson.
It is moving from one found space, a function room above a pub, to another found space: a former library, just around the corner. And to bid farewell to its old space, it has commissioned the interactive performance troupe non zero one to make an audio tour of the space in which we are taken into and around the theatre one last time, for a show called this is where we got to when you came in that I saw on Friday.
We were led around in groups of just four people to see places that the public never visited, like the communal upstairs backstage dressing room and outside steel spiral staircase that the actors had to descend to get to the stage level, and the cramped backstage offices that served as the development and production offices (at one time these were in a separate building to the theatre itself, but its current, soon-to-depart artistic director Josie Rourke brought them back in-house a few years ago, in an effort to save £20,000 rent a year and spend it on production instead).
Of course there’s something infinitely plain and functional about a theatre stripped back to its bare walls, as this one has now become, and seeing its offices all being packed up of their infinite clutter but scripts and leaflets still lying all around the place. And no wonder; the theatre, we are told here, receives 120 scripts a month, so approximately 1,440 a year.
If it sometimes felt like you were looking at a corpse, since the real life of the place has already gone out of it and only the shell of it remains, the show echoed, in every sense, with the life of its past, with voices and testimonies from people who’ve worked here, including actors Alan Rickman, Geoffrey Streatfeild, Michelle Terry, Samuel Barnett and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, writers like Jonathan Harvey, Robert Holman, Dusty Hughes and Jack Thorne, and directors like Mike Bradwell, Josie Rourke and Tamara Harvey, providing illuminating light and texture to what made it so uniquely special.
Not everyone who was asked to speak felt able to do so: conspicuous by his absence was former artistic director Dominic Dromgoole, though his distinctive voice could be heard, in its absence, in the anonymous contributor who said that speaking about it would be like talking about the first time he’d made love to his wife. It felt too personal.
The Bush Theatre is about to publish a book, “Close-Up Magic: 40 Years at the Bush Theatre”, to which I’ve made a small contribution about seeing the original production of Beautiful Thing there; but it was a beautiful thing indeed to visit the theatre one more time last Friday and say goodbye to the room where this magic happened.
Of course, we bring our own accumulation of theatrical memories to a visit like this (though strangely, two of my fellow visitors on Friday were making their first-ever visit there, while the third person on my group was fellow veteran theatre critic Carole Woddis). And as we stood in the dark and rather tiny theatre space, its shutters open to grimy windows overlooking Shepherd’s Bush Green (a view I’d never seen before from inside this theatre), I felt moved, exhilarated and just a little relieved, too. I may never stand in this space again (unless, of course, some other fringe company takes it over!); it has given me and the world so much. But I won’t miss its serial discomforts, either. I can’t wait for the next chapter in the Bush’s history, and the next forty years of its life.
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