Chris Bush

Creating theatre of scale

Bush’s career is on an extraordinary trajectory, with each show seemingly becoming ever larger and more logistically complex. Where Standing at the Sky’s Edge brings three interwoven stories together on one stage, last year’s Rock/Paper/Scissors did it across three separate stages, simultaneously. “That began as a structural puzzle box,” Bush explains of the Sheffield Theatres’ show. “Can we do three shows with one cast at the same time? The light-bulb moment was the idea that we’re all heroes in our own story, but we might all be antagonists in someone else’s story.” Audiences could choose to see one show or return until they had seen all three, learning how the characters wove into each other’s lives, noticing how, “we never quite get a full picture of everyone we meet”. 

It is clear from her work that she enjoys a challenge. “I’ve never been afraid of scale. When I wrote purely for myself, when nothing was getting put on, I was writing big-cast shows.” This is not the traditional model of development for a writer, where you might start with a two-hander and then move up to a three or four-person show. But then you run the risk, Bush says, of “suddenly feeling exposed on a mid-scale show because you’ve never had to write for 20 people before”. Her route was rather different; her first full-scale commission was a version of the medieval Mystery Plays in Sheffield. “We had 91 people in the cast,” she laughs. “That was a baptism of fire.”

‘I can trace a line from having tea with a producer in Sheffield to doing a show on the Olivier stage with 230 people’

With hindsight, she can map the spider diagram of one show leading to another. The Sheffield Mysteries paved the way to writing Pericles, which became the first Public Acts performance at the National, a community show with a whopping cast of 230. That, in turn, has led to Bush’s newly announced project, The Odyssey, a five-year celebration of the Public Acts community programme. 

“I couldn’t have done The Odyssey without having done Rock/Paper/Scissors, which I couldn’t have done if I hadn’t done Sky’s Edge, which I couldn’t have done without the background in building those large community shows.” 

The Odyssey doesn’t just cover a big stage or a big cast, but distance too. The epic tale is being reimagined by five writers across five cities: Stoke-on-Trent, Doncaster, Trowbridge, Sunderland and London. It will be told by hundreds of community members and a travelling 10-metre galley ship, culminating in a performance at the National in August. 

“I’m only writing the London part, fortunately,” Bush says, on account of her already very full plate, “but I’m dramaturging and helping out on the others.” It’s a new type of puzzle for her to work on. “Again, it’s moving pieces. How do you tell this story in five episodes where every episode is entirely satisfactory as a stand-alone story, but also forms part of a cohesive whole with a through-line and sense of narrative satisfaction?” We’ll find out later this year.

Q&A

What was your first non-theatre job? 

Being a tour guide/chocolatier at York’s Chocolate Story.

What was your first professional theatre job? 

Working front of house at the Grand Opera House in York.

What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out? 

More people will read your work than you are aware of at the time.

Who do you most admire? 

Caryl Churchill.

If you hadn’t been a playwright, what would you have been? 

Every member of my family wanted to go into theatre and ended up in education, so probably that.

Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals? 

No, but I’ve always liked the bundles they do at Shakespeare’s Globe, where they get everyone to put in a little artefact and it’s tied up in a cloth bundle and then hung under the stage.

What’s your next job?

The Odyssey, this summer.

What advice would you give to a young playwright?

It’s so trite and obvious, but read and watch as much as you have the capacity to.

Learning to write musicals

Growing up, a career in playwriting seemed fairly obvious to Bush. “In a drawer somewhere, my mum has notebooks of stories that I would dictate before I could actually write,” she says. She learnt to love the stage at Sheffield Theatres under the direction of Michael Grandage. “We were a pretty skint family but my parents had a real love for theatre, so me and my sister were taken from an early age. It never struck me that this was an elitist pursuit.” 

At a drama class aged 13, she was handed a flyer for the National Young Playwright Festival, which considered a young playwright to be anywhere between 12 and 25. She wrote a play called Harsh Reality. “I had a very happy childhood,” she is eager to clarify, “but this was the most grim slice of dysfunctional social realism. Clearly, in my head, that was what serious theatre was.” Her show was selected to go on a mini tour in the South East, performed by professional actors. “It was totally formative. I’d written something and it had been put on. So I went: ‘Great, that’s what I’m going to do then.’ ” She chuckles. “I don’t think I realised how unusual that was.”

In sixth form, already firm on her future, she applied to the University of York. The choice was partly due to the course – half English literature, half writing and performance – but largely for the drama society, which at the time had the reputation for being the best in the country. “The Black Box Studio was indestructible. We could do whatever we wanted.” With a group of friends, she took a show to Edinburgh but it sold barely any tickets and lost whatever money they’d put into it. So, for her next attempt, she decided to be strategic: “What sells in Edinburgh? Musicals and anything vaguely topical.” With music by Ian McCluskey, she wrote TONY! The Blair Musical, a rock opera that included a barbershop quartet of former Tory leaders. Both the title and poster of Harry Hill’s musical, TONY! [The Tony Blair Rock Opera], which premiered last year and is now about to tour, are eerily similar to what she was doing in 2007. “I would be bitter if they weren’t 20 years too late,” she says glacially. 

‘I’ve never been afraid of scale. When I wrote purely for myself, I was writing big-cast shows’

By this point, aged 21, she’d been writing plays for eight years. TONY! became a training ground to learn how musical theatre operated, and it gave her foundational skills that would serve her years later for creating works such as 2018’s The Assassination of Katie Hopkins, which the real Hopkins protested against by hiring a van to drive around near Theatr Clwyd with a screen telling people to “get the other side of the story” on her website. 

“It was a good student show,” Bush says of TONY!, while accepting her place in the trend of “exclamation mark the musical”. “It’s not what I’d do now, but I stand by it. There is a real rise and fall and a proper connection to music. When you get Myspace! The Musical now, you’re just picking a word that’s in the public consciousness. But the story is everything.” 

TONY! did so well it had a short run at the Pleasance in London; she still remembers the buzz of the standing ovation on the final night. And then? “Almost nothing for about five years.” Bush may seem as though she’s one of the busiest writers in the business, but for a long time it felt as if no one was paying attention. She stayed in York for another six or seven years, with London seeming very expensive and no real reason or connections to move there. She worked “whatever minimum-wage, low-responsibility jobs would pay my rent and not much else” – front of house at the Grand Opera House in York; a tour guide and chocolatier at tourist attraction York’s Chocolate Story. These sustained her while she was writing, sending scripts off into the void. 

One of the bigger surprises about being well-known now is that she’s found out, years later, that her work actually was getting read in that tumbleweed period. “I occasionally meet people who will go: ‘I read such-and-such a play 10 years ago. We couldn’t do anything with it but always loved it and remembered it.’ ” She throws her hands up. “I never knew that.” She kept thinking her big break was coming; a script would be optioned by a West End producer, then dropped. “It’s weird how things pan out. Things I thought would change everything never did at all.

And then, a cup of tea did bring about significant change. She had been working on comedy songs with McCluskey, her co-writer on TONY!, and having seen an open-mic night at the Crucible, emailed the creative producer asking if they could have a slot. “And by the way,” she added into the email, “I’m a playwright. Or trying to be.” The event was booked up but he said to come and have a cup of tea. He read her work and asked if she wanted to be the theatre’s playwright-in-residence for an initiative they were applying to, the Pearson Playwrights’ Scheme. Around the UK, theatres chose a playwright and applied for funding. That year – 2013 – Sheffield Theatres got picked, and Bush spent a year writing for its community shows. 

At the time, Lyndsey Turner was an associate director at Sheffield, and when she was directing Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire at the National, she put Bush together with director Emily Lim to make a response piece with the community. “That ended up being a chemistry test for what became Public Acts and doing Pericles. So I can trace a very clear line from having a cup of tea with this producer in Sheffield to doing a show on the Olivier stage with 230 people. But,” she concedes, “over the span of a good number of years and all the various dead ends.”

Last year, Bush opened eight shows – a slight accident she puts down to pandemic panic. “I said yes to absolutely everything,” she confesses. “I’d do the same again because they were all things I really enjoyed doing and was proud of. But I do still worry if things dry up. What if you’re not the flavour of the month in a year’s time?”

The new frontier

For now, there’s plenty in the pipeline. As well as an intensely secret project she describes as “exciting, daunting, with a lot of things to get wrong”, Standing at the Sky’s Edge is being adapted for screen. “It’s like learning a new language,” she says of figuring out the world of television. “A lot of my work has an innate theatricality. It’s built for a live medium.” When she occasionally teaches, she’ll often encounter plays that read as if they’re TV shows. Now, she has to relearn how to do the opposite. “I’m doing reverse engineering,” she says, “thinking about what I haven’t been able to do before. How do you let the camera do the heavy lifting, where in a single shot you can cover a page of expository dialogue? It feels like a new frontier.” 

In every project she talks about, there is a genuine admiration for the teams she works with. She is effusive and frequent in her praise, particularly for the cast and crew of Standing at the Sky’s Edge, which, in a harsh world, is a story full of hope. 

Hope, she says, is something she can struggle with. “On a day-to-day basis and on a personal, selfish level,” she tries to explain, “I’m doing great. Professionally, I’ve got a show that’s selling out at the National. I’ve got a string of exciting things in the pipeline. I’ve got a wonderful partner and two excellent cats. And yet,” she falters, “the world is a terrifying place and we are going in the wrong direction. It’s a disheartening time to exist as a queer person, when the government is intentionally trying to provoke fear of the other – whatever ‘other’ that might be.”

She sighs out a long breath. “But I do feel that theatre is a machine for empathy. That’s what it does better than anything else, and maybe that’s what brings me hope.” If we can control little else, she suggests, we can at least control the stories we tell. “The world changes when enough people change their mind, and you change minds through narrative, through story.” And so, the stories we choose to tell become more important than ever. As she says of writing her own characters: affection and love can take you a long way. 

CV Chris Bush

Born: Sheffield, 1986
Training: University of York, English Literature
Landmark productions:
• TONY! The Blair Musical, York Theatre Royal; Edinburgh Fringe; Pleasance, Islington (2007)
• The Sheffield Mysteries, Sheffield Theatres (2014)
• The Assassination of Katie Hopkins, Theatr Clwyd, Wales (2018)
• Pericles, National Theatre, London (2018)
• Faustus: That Damned Woman, Lyric Hammersmith, London (2020)
• Rock/Paper/Scissors, Sheffield Theatres (2022)
• Standing at the Sky’s Edge, Sheffield Theatres (2019), National Theatre, London (2023)
Awards:
• Sunday Times NSDF award for TONY! The Blair Musical (2007)
• UK Theatre best musical production award for Standing at the Sky’s Edge (2019)
Agent: Matt Connell and Alexandra Cory at Berlin Associates

Standing at the Sky’s Edge is at the National, London until March 25