‘It is absolutely, fundamentally not autobiography’: Chris Bush on her new play about the trans experience
The award-winning British dramatist had a huge hit with her Richard Hawley musical Standing at the Sky’s Edge. Her latest, Otherland, is a much more personal piece – and, she says, frightening
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.’”
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