Bush Theatre hits the road to reach community as part of £4m refurb

The Bush Theatre is to take the show on the road as part of a £4 million re-development to create a second stage and increase seating.

The new-writing powerhouse will get a 60 to 70 seater studio space and expand its 144-seater main auditorium by a fifth as part of ambitious plans to attract bigger audiences and develop more diverse work.

Artistic director Madani Younis today said he wanted the Bush to be “more reflective” of the capital as he revealed the new season will bring pop-up theatre to venues across west London. Construction work is due to get under way next month with the company going on tour for the rest of the year at Bush Hall, The Tabernacle in Notting Hill and various locations in Shepherd’s Bush before moving back into its revamped home in early 2017.

Younis told the Standard: “The studio will help us develop new work that stays true to our spirit and to complement the main stage. We’ve always been committed to diversity and the redevelopment will help us continue.

“It was also important for us to remain in west London and keep the momentum going during the building work.”

The theatre will get a new front-of house, expanded bar and café, more accessible entrance and improved backstage facilities as part of the revamp, funded by the Arts Council, Hammersmith and Fulham council and public and private backers.

The expansion comes amid the rapid gentrification of the area with traders on Shepherd’s Bush Market due to take their fight against a £150 million scheme to build 212 flats on the site to the Court of Appeal next month.

Younis said he understood “money is a barrier” to theatre and has frozen prices for the extra seats in the main stage at £10. Traders and residents have been consulted for forthcoming production This Place We Know, to be staged in spaces along Uxbridge Road.

The Neighbourhood Project, another site-specific work developed with the local community, is also part of the new season, which will start with Boys Will Be Boys by Melissa Bubnic at Bush Hall. The play looks at the difficulties women face in the male world of the City.

If you stand at the entrance to the Bush Theatre, and take a quick look up to your left you’ll see the railway bridge by Shepherd’s Bush Market. When I started as Artistic Director at the Bush in 2011, I was told that less than 20 years ago that bridge was described as being the “frontline”: the physical divide between the ‘haves and have nots’ in Shepherd’s Bush.

Things have changed, but only marginally. The Bush Theatre still sits at the crossroads of everything it is to live in London today. Within a couple of miles’ radius you’ll find one of the highest proportions of £1m plus houses in the UK, alongside significant levels of social deprivation. Our road, the Uxbridge Road, is one of the most diverse in the country with more languages spoken down it than any other in Europe. Turn right out of our door and you’re in one of the country’s most illustrious shopping malls; turn left and you’re in one of London’s few markets still filled by family businesses, not brand names.

These extremes are what makes London great, but also presents it with its biggest challenges – the same goes for theatre. Whilst there is an extraordinary wealth of diverse artistic talent existing in this city, too frequently those from BAME backgrounds have been restricted to cultural ghettos and outhouses – rather than at the heart of our institutions. My worry is not that theatre in our great city will still exist in another 20 years – but rather that theatre will have purely become the domain of a chosen few.

Back in 2011, I remember recoiling in anger as David Cameron made his famous statement that “multiculturalism has failed” in the UK. The questions that we ask now are going to define how the next generation sees the theatre buildings in London. It is incumbent on us to speak up for everyone in our society: asking the questions on our stages that the politicians aren’t going to. For theatre, this is a moment in time that we ignore at our peril, or we could be left with well-resourced buildings which are impenetrable and irrelevant to the people who walk past them every day.

Our Prime Minister might think that multiculturalism has failed – I can assure him that there is a generation of artists seeking to prove him wrong.

Madani Younis

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