A few years back, Chris Bush, the 38-year-old playwright from Sheffield, was working on two projects pretty much simultaneously. One was called Faustus: That Damned Woman, a radical, gender-switching retelling of the Faust myth (the deal-with-the-devil guy), which she was producing with the groundbreaking Headlong theatre company. It was, she was sure, the best piece she had ever written. “In my mind, because it’s Faustus, it’s proper literature, so I was very excited,” Bush recalls. “I was already being a dickhead, going: ‘Oh yeah, this is the thing that’s going to transfer into the West End. And win me my first Olivier.’”
The other show was a jukebox musical drawing from the back catalogue of singer-songwriter Richard Hawley. The Crucible in Sheffield had already started selling tickets for the show, but the narrative of the play was a disaster and director Rob Hastie called in Bush a few months before opening to do a page-one, conceptual overhaul of the existing script. “Maybe this sounds grand,” she says, “but my energy coming into it was a bit: ‘Oh, I’m doing a favour for a theatre that I love dearly and respect, and a director who I respect and love dearly, to try to get this show on.’”
Bush laughs: she couldn’t really have been more wrong. Faustus: That Damned Woman opened at the Lyric Hammersmith in London in 2020 to lukewarm reviews; there was talk of a UK tour, but that was scuppered by the Covid pandemic. The Hawley musical, meanwhile, which she rewrote in a wild, sleep-deprived month, went on to tick off all her career ambitions and has become something of a modern classic. Standing at the Sky’s Edge, which follows three generations of residents in a Sheffield housing estate, started life at the Crucible in 2019 before transferring first to the National Theatre in 2023 and then to the West End last year. At the 2023 Olivier awards, it earned eight nominations, winning two, including best new musical.
“Throughout my career,” says Bush, “the things that have been, ‘Oh it’s a [meeting over] coffee that I don’t expect to go anywhere’ have happened to be the things that have snowballed and become the really special ones.”
Remembering this lesson makes Bush nervous. Her latest play, Otherland, has just opened at the Almeida theatre in north London. Bush has been working on it for almost eight years and it is, she believes, the most ambitious, technically daring and certainly the most personal piece she has ever written. The idea of it fizzling out would be heart-wrenching. “Hopefully we can break the cycle,” she says, smiling. “Because in my head, I’ve set up Otherland to be absolutely transformative in terms of the impact it is going to have. So I hope it can be what I’m building it up to be in my head.”
Otherland begins with the break-up of a young couple, Harry and Jo. The snippy back-and-forth of the separation will probably be familiar – such as the pass-agg dividing of the CDs (though gen Z-ers might be bemused by this detail) – but the reason for the rupture is specific: Harry wants to come out as a trans woman and Jo struggles to deal with the change. The rest of the play follows their divergent paths, told through conventional dialogue but also in musical interludes and surreal, allegorical flights of fancy. Harry embarks on her journey, an often-tortuous navigation of practical hurdles, such as toilets and applying for a new passport, to broader challenges of acceptance and relentless questioning. Jo tries to live off-grid, but meets a new partner, Gabby, and has to decide if she wants to be a surrogate mother. Very different experiences, but, in Bush’s deft hands, also not.
The jumping-off point for Otherland is a familiar scenario for Bush, who has long, dark hair, centre-parted, and wears a necklace of a paper boat. “It is absolutely, fundamentally not autobiography,” she says, over coffee in a cafe around the corner from the Almeida. “It is not a true story of me. However, yes, I was in a long-term relationship for the best part of a decade, which did end. And actually there is quite a lot of me in elements of Harry, a trans character. There is, I’d say, almost nothing, or as little as possible, of my ex in the character of Jo. Which felt like the responsible thing for me to do as an artist, because I can write about my own experiences and trauma and, actually, I’m not interested in getting into anybody else’s.
“But one of the tragedies,” she goes on, “which is touched on in the show, is that one of the reasons I finally felt able to come out after so long was because I felt like I was in a stable and loving enough relationship and that this was going to be fine. Then it very quickly wasn’t. And that was, you know, as difficult as one might expect it to be.”
Bush came out as a trans woman not long after her 30th birthday. Already an established playwright, she felt there was an expectation to immediately focus on gender identity in her work. But Bush was reluctant to do so, partly because she felt uncomfortable at that time writing about herself, but mainly because she didn’t want to be pigeonholed.
“Then also, because it’s fucking terrifying, actually,” Bush adds. “Even in London, even in the arts, why would I invite that into my professional or public life? You know, I’m a playwright: no one gives a shit about playwrights, ultimately. But being able to see that any trans woman or any trans person with any public profile only has to say the most innocuous thing to immediately get virtual and real-world hatred. Why would you sign up for that yourself?”
The idea of entering the bear pit that is the public discourse on trans issues is clearly still scary for Bush. This is the first newspaper interview she has given where she has spoken about gender identity and her own personal experience, and she weighs her words carefully. Bush is also keen to tread gently with Otherland.
“I didn’t want to write an angry play,” she says. “For reasons that I thoroughly understand and quite often feel myself, there is a lot of anger and a lot of rage and a lot of blame in work made by trans artists. I’ve been in audiences before where it does just feel like you get told off for 90 minutes and told that you should feel bad about yourself and your choices. But this show is really a plea for understanding for womanhood of all different types and shapes and sizes and forms.”
At the same time, though, Bush wants to make sure that Otherland counts – and makes a difference. By her calculation, if all the tickets sell in the four-week run, about 10,000 people will come to the Almeida to see it. Whether she likes it or not, she has become a spokesperson for a group that is the subject of endless debate but makes up a very small part of the British population. “There might not be another play written by a trans woman this year, this decade, this whatever, of this prestige and at a venue like the Almeida,” she notes. “So even if you don’t sign up for it, you are put in a position of representing more than just yourself.”
Bush sighs: “So yeah, you know, pressure.”
***
The potential for theatre to move hearts and minds clearly drives Bush and Otherland. “My most naive belief is that theatre really does have the capacity to change the world in a way that no other artistic medium does,” she says. “Theatre is a machine for empathy. You sit in the dark with a group of other living, breathing people watching other living, breathing people who you know are real. And you watch a world that is like yours, in some cases, maybe very like yours, or it might be very, very different. And you get an insight into another world or a character or a point of view. And that is how things start to change.”
Bush has always had a deep attachment to the theatre. Her mother studied drama in the 1970s and wanted to be an actor, but ended up in teaching; her father trained as an architect but did backstage theatre work as a hobby. When Bush was a teenager, Michael Grandage was artistic director of Sheffield Theatres and it was a golden age for a young dramaturg in the city: Joseph Fiennes played Edward II and Kenneth Branagh was Richard III; you could scarcely leave the house without bumping into Derek Jacobi.
By this point, Bush was already writing. When she was 13, she entered the National Young Playwrights festival, a competition for writers aged 12 to 25. Her play, a gritty piece of social realism called Harsh Reality – which was, she now accepts, somewhat at odds with her own upbringing – won a prize and was performed by professional actors. Bush studied English at York University and wrote plays that the drama society took up to the Edinburgh fringe. “I spent quite a lot of time trying to be Tom Stoppard when I was figuring out what kind of a writer I wanted to be,” she says. “Turns out, that’s quite hard.”
Most of these shows sank with little trace, but then Bush had a brainwave: “What sells in Edinburgh?” she asks. “Things that are in the news sell and musicals sell.” In 2007, her final year at York, she wrote TONY! The Blair Musical, a rock opera that reimagined the Labour leader as an Eva Perón figure and included a barbershop quartet of former Tory leaders. The show, which had previews in York two weeks after Blair stood down, had a sell-out run at the fringe and then a week at the Pleasance in London. “We hit this tidal wave of publicity,” says Bush. “I really thought I’d made it.” A comic pause: “Then nothing happened for about five years.”
Around this time, Bush was in flux personally. “I wasn’t one of these people who knew from an extremely early age who I was,” she says. “But certainly from my early teens, I had a very, very clear idea of who I was. Or who I would like to be, if I had any say in it. Which I didn’t feel like I did at the time.”
Part of the issue was that Bush didn’t know any trans people to swap notes with. Also, the recurring narrative of those that did come out was that they were so desperate, even suicidal, that they had no choice but to start hormone therapy. “And I was going: ‘Well, I’m not being who I want to be, but I’m not suicidal. Therefore, I can’t want this enough.’ I spent years, decades, telling myself: ‘If I just leave this alone, it will eventually go away.’ And this is not a great long-term strategy.”
When eventually Bush did come out, there was not much fallout, aside from the relationship break-up. “Broadly, people are indifferent to loosely positive,” she says. Her parents were understanding and the writing work kept coming. After doing community shows in Sheffield, she made a punchy adaptation of Pericles at the National in 2018 that had a cast of 230. “Has the National Theatre ever felt as open, compassionate and heartfelt as this?” asked the Guardian’s five-star review. Then, the same year, there was another eye-catching project: The Assassination of Katie Hopkins at Theatr Clwyd in Wales, which imagines a near future where Hopkins is killed and posthumously becomes “a Diana of the far right”.
Bush – who now lives in south London with her partner Roni Neale, a stage manager and writer, and their two cats – remains one of Britain’s busiest playwrights: in 2023, she opened a near-impossible eight shows. “I’m not down the mines, but I still live with an absolute fear of the work drying up, because anything in the arts feels precarious,” she says. “And also, I’m not from inherited wealth. I pay my bills through writing theatre, which puts me in such a rarefied position. I do think it’s important to talk about money, because theatre becomes such a middle-class pursuit, and is, generally speaking, entirely populated by people who don’t make a living out of it. Because you can’t really make a living out of it.”
The discussion of money could be timely. After Otherland, Bush hopes to kick on with a television adaptation of Standing at the Sky’s Edge, which is in development with Red, the production company that made It’s a Sin and Happy Valley. She thinks there’s a pretty solid pilot and would like to write all the episodes. “It will be a very, very different thing, which I hope will still have the spirit of the original,” says Bush. “Trying to contrast some slightly knowingly kitsch, big old MGM musicals, people cartwheeling down the balconies, versus those quiet moments of heartbreak, which is such a fun challenge. If we get to make it – touch wood – then it will be incredibly exciting.”
Bush finishes her coffee and is needed back at rehearsals for Otherland. She has been very specific about casting on this run and others going forward: the eight actors had to be female; the play should never be performed by an all-white ensemble; and Harry must be played by a trans woman, in this case newcomer Fizz Sinclair. “I’m not a religious person at all, but theatre is the closest thing I have to a spiritual experience,” says Bush. “Particularly in a space like the Almeida, which really has a very sacred feel to that auditorium, that you gather and bear witness to something.
“Theatre is extremely special,” Bush continues, as we part ways. “I want to do a couple of TV series to buy a house. But theatre will always be the thing that I want to do the most.”
Otherland runs at the Almeida theatre in London until 15 March
