Lynette Linton on Bush Theatre 50th anniversary: ‘We’re shifting the canon - the West End needs to catch up’

It is, you discover quite quickly, almost impossible to get Lynette Linton to blow her own trumpet. The artistic director of the Bush Theatre, who was appointed in 2019 at the age of 28 (the youngest ever), who in the next year will direct three shows including one at the National Theatre, and see the broadcast of her first full-length TV film, is almost pathologically collaborative. In a text after our interview she ends “I hope I shouted out my team enough!”

She did. Linton, who since her arrival has had to grow up fast as a leader to steer her organisation through the pandemic, is a new breed of artistic director. Every time she gives a speech, she makes sure to be flanked by her executive director Lauren Clancy and her associate artistic director Daniel Bailey. When talking about the Bush’s Emerging Writers group, which supports six new writers across a nine month attachment, she makes a point of mentioning her literary manager Deirdre O’Halloran (and her team - “I can’t leave anyone out”). “Dee literally sits with writers, and they go through [a script] page by page.” She can’t stop herself.

We’re in a mildly chilly rehearsal room at the Bush to talk about the theatre’s 50th anniversary season, announced today. Made up entirely of new, unseen plays, all commissioned for the Bush (not all by Linton - some have taken a while to come to fruition) and featuring writers such as Waleed Akhtar and Ambreen Razia and directors like Anthony Simpson-Pike and Róisín McBrinn, it triumphantly reflects the diversity that we’ve come to expect from Linton’s tenure. The headline show, by virtue of the name attached to it, will be August in England, a monologue written and performed by Sir Lenny Henry, about a man who came over from Jamaica and built a life in West Bromwich, now threatened with deportation. (Typically, rather than snaffling this little jewel for herself, Linton will co-direct it with Bailey in spring next year. “We tag-team,” she smiles).

She’s also directing the first show in the season, House of Ife by Beru Tessema, about a British-Ethiopian family struggling in the wake of the death of their eldest son.

“Beru was one of our emerging writers a year ago and he wrote this play on attachment with us. When I heard the reading I was like WOW, YEAH. I talk a lot about the canon, and [the need for] black British stories on an epic scale - this is what that is for me. We look at African American work, and it’s incredible, the scale of that stuff is amazing. But I’m like, where’s the black British [epic plays]?”

She cites Nine Night by Natasha Gordon, which had its premiere at the National Theatre Dorfman in 2018 and went on to the West End as one example, but “a lot of work, that has been produced from black artists particularly, isn’t published,” she says.

“That’s why I feel so passionate about it, that work has been there. I have amazing conversations with Adjoa [Andoh, with whom Linton co-directed Richard II with an all-female cast of colour in 2019], about the stuff [she did] back in the day, but some of it wasn’t published, it’s just crazy to me. We’ve been telling these stories for such a long time, but they just don’t [get recognition]. I hope it’s changing.”

If Linton’s upcoming year is anything to go by, it is. In the summer BBC One will broadcast her 90-minute film adaptation of Kit de Waal’s book My Name is Leon. It’s the story of a nine year-old mixed race boy whose mother has another younger child who is white. When both children are taken into care, Leon’s little brother is adopted, while Leon is not.

“It’s basically about his mission to get his brother back,” she explains. “You’re gonna sob. In the edit suite people were like ’I can’t watch it!’”

The story is undeniably bleak, but also, says Linton, beautiful - during the course of the film Leon meets an older black man, Tufty, played by Malachi Kirby (the cast also includes Lenny Henry, Monica Dolan, Olivia Williams and Christopher Eccleston), and through him “he discovers his blackness, and who he is and where he’s from.

“That relationship on screen, Tufty and Leon, but also Malachi and Cole [Martin] who played Leon, was just unbelievably beautiful to watch and direct the two of them together. And it also shows you the lack of that on telly, or in theatre - a black man, a father figure, and a young black boy, shown positively. It just blows me away.”

Then in September Linton will make her National Theatre debut directing Blues for an Alabama Sky by the American playwright Pearl Cleage, starring Hamilton’s Giles Terera and Samira Wiley (Orange is the New Black; The Handmaid’s Tale).

“It’s about four friends in Harlem, in the Renaissance, trying to live their lives, and then a stranger comes from Alabama and kind of throws everything around,” Linton explains. She wanted to do it “because it’s just African American people living. And it’s hilarious and heartbreaking and funny, and they’re doing stuff that’s really exciting. You’ve got a doctor, a woman who’s campaigning for abortion rights, a singer and an openly gay man who’s designing. That is revolutionary, in the fact that they’re just living their lives and I never see that on stage. When’s the last time you saw a black doctor on stage?”

Post-pandemic it’s possible to see a new kind of optimism in Linton. I ask her how she and her peers are feeling about theatre after the last couple of years, as big West End shows struggle to rebuild audiences reliant on non-existent tourism. They’re all part of the same ecosystem, right?

“That’s such an interesting question, because I have questioned who my peers are sometimes, you know,” she says. She accepts the ecosystem comparison but she disputes that they’re doing the same thing. “The traditional theatre audience that will go see that stuff [in the West End] is obviously incredibly valuable and important. But I’m interested in that shift. That thing I’m saying about shifting the canon? They need to catch up with us. Because we’re moving things.”

Her focus at the Bush is on people like the young woman she was when she first walked into the Theatre Royal Stratford East after meeting the British multi-hyphenate Rikki Beadle-Blair at the National Youth Theatre. Growing up mostly with her mum in Leytonstone with her little brother and two much older sisters who encouraged her creativity, she’d always written - novels written in installments and passed around under the tables at school; “People would wait every week for the next chapter of the book” - but originally wanted to be an actor. “I wanted to be in Eastenders.”

Then Beadle-Blair invited her to the Angelic Tales festival of new writing at Stratford East. “I have this vivid memory of sitting by the box office at Stratford East, really nervous because of all those people. I just sat waiting for him, like, what do I do? And he just came up to me and placed a ticket in my hand and walked out. And I was just like, OK, cool. That just changed it all, man.”

The playwright, actor and hiphop artist Jonny Wright had a first reading of a play at the festival “and I remember watching and going, wow, this is cool, these are people I recognise. And I went outside and I remember standing at the bus stop for like an hour afterwards just thinking, my mum always said I was a writer. I think I’m an actor, but maybe I’m not? Or maybe I should write for myself?”

That’s what she wants for the Bush. A space where people who don’t think theatre is necessarily for them can come and feel part of it. During the pandemic they set up two Young Companies, for 14-17 and 18-25 year olds, as well as a West London Playwrights group, a beginners group for people from the local area.

“We’re trying to make sure that this building feels accessible and comfortable,” she says. “I wanted this to be a space for me, like Stratford East was back in the day.” Once her first play, Step, was programmed there, “ I literally would just turn up and sit in the greenroom. I didn’t have any reason to be there, I was just one of the young people that were just there - it was that sort of space. And that’s what I wanted this space to be. I shouldn’t just fixate on young people, because it’s not just young people [coming], but they really are the future. And there’s still so much work to be done there, and that’s a different type of work than the West End does.”

So she feels “really excited and hopeful. COVID slowed down that process, but I’m excited about the leaders of tomorrow. That we can sit down in 20 years time with a glass of wine and go oh, my days. That young person who was in my Young Company is now running the Bush. Is now running the Donmar. Is now the next - who’s really famous? - Andrew Lloyd Webber!” This makes her laugh out loud, but it’s not completely mad - even the idea that it might be her. Her major, life-goal dream, slightly unexpectedly, is to direct a stage version of the Disney musical Hercules. I watched it over lockdown after the first time she mentioned it (there have been… many) and you know what, it’s pretty good.

“Oh my days,” she swoons. “Please can we find a way of making that happen. I play the songs, if people are in bad moods, I just play it and we dance because they’re JUST SO GOOD. I don’t know if I should tell you this but I had this plan that I was going to, like, hang around while they were making Frozen the Musical [in the West End], right? And just meet the Disney producers and be like, hello. I’m a director who really, desperately wants to make Hercules. And then COVID hit. That was literally my plan. That is my dream. Oh my God. I’d love to do that.” Disney, what are you waiting for?

The Bush Theatre 50th anniversary season is announced today; bushtheatre.co.uk