"I masqueraded as a property developer who wanted to build a theatre."
Artistic director Jay Miller on the first fourteen years of The Yard Theatre, the final show before it is torn down, and the new venue that will take its place. Plus: three shows to see next week.
Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a newsletter about theatre by Fergus Morgan.
This is the free Friday issue, which usually contains an interview with an exciting theatremaker or an essay on a theatre-related topic. This week, it is an interview with Jay Miller, founder and artistic director of The Yard Theatre, which is about to be torn down and rebuilt. After that, there is a list of my five favourite Yard Theatre shows from the last fourteen years, and your usual three shows recommendations.
In case you missed it, here is this week’s issue of Shouts And Murmurs, which is a weekly round-up of the most interesting writing about theatre elsewhere…
You can get Shouts And Murmurs straight in your inbox every Tuesday - and help keep this newsletter going - by signing up as a paid supporter of The Crush Bar.
The Yard Theatre is dead. Long live The Yard Theatre.
For fourteen years, a reclaimed warehouse in Hackney Wick has been home to some of the boldest, most exciting theatre shows in London. Originally imagined as a pop-up space that would only exist for three months in 2011, The Yard Theatre has instead grown into a vibrant venue of national importance, a two-time winner of The Peter Brook Empty Space Award for theatrical innovation where several famous names have staged early work. In 2012, it hosted an early iteration of Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum Dreams. In 2014, it staged the first production of Alexander Zeldin’s Beyond Caring. In 2019, it staged an experimental revival of The Crucible starring Emma D’Arcy.
Now, the much-loved venue is being demolished and rebuilt anew. The final show to take to its makeshift stage is a revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie starring Sharon Small, Tom Varey, Eva Morgan and Jad Sayegh, and directed by The Yard Theatre’s founder and artistic director Jay Miller. Here, Miller discusses the show, The Yard Theatre’s extraordinary first fourteen years, and its exciting future.
You are currently in rehearsals for the final production in this iteration of The Yard Theatre. How are you feeling?
To be honest, I’m finding it a little tricky to take in. This has been a huge part of my life for fourteen years. It is almost too big to know how to feel. I’m feeling a bit numb at the moment. I am not a particularly sentimental person, but I think it’ll really hit me at some point, probably on the final night of the show.
Why did you choose The Glass Menagerie for the final show?
It is a story that asks whether it is possible to leave behind something you can’t leave behind. That obviously resonates with what is happening with the theatre. Also, I lost my mum when I was a teenager, and there is something in the play about how, although they might disappear, your family are always with you. I have been wanting to explore those two things on stage for some time and The Glass Menagerie does that. It is a flawless play. It explores all that brilliantly.
It is only the second existing play you have directed, after The Crucible in 2019. That revival was quite bold and expressive, and it had a female John Proctor. What are you planning to do with The Glass Menagerie?
We’re really leaning into what Williams actually wrote. A lot of contemporary productions omit the fragmentary nature of the script. It has these gorgeous scenes but also fragments of images and fragments of text and fragments of sound.
I didn’t know this was the first memory play until I started my research. Williams was a genius. He brilliantly evokes how we remember. We remember in snatches, in the glimpse of a hairbrush or the trace of a smell, and our memory mushrooms out from those tiny details into a story we tell ourselves. We are leaning into that.
Would you agree that The Yard Theatre is well suited to that? A lot of the shows I have seen there have a hazy, almost hallucinatory quality to them.
I do agree. The work that has interested me over the years is the work that explores what a live unreality is. Over this theatre’s lifetime, the world has gone through increasingly intense news cycles that we have experienced via screens. I believe that we go to the theatre for something different. We want to create a new world that will enable us to understand and feel differently about the real world we step back into. We are interested in the idea of hallucination in order to seek progress.
Do you think that you will be able to hang on to that atmosphere and that identity in the new building?
I do. We are shifting the foundations, but we are retaining the spirit. Our actors have not had proper dressing rooms. We haven’t had a shower on site since 2013. We are tired of getting leaks in the roof all the time. We want to change all that, but we are not seeking a revolution. We are trying to create an evolution.
The architects we are working with – Takero Shimazaki Architects – spent almost eighteen months understanding The Yard, what people like about it, and what makes it unique prior to designing the new theatre. I’m pretty sure it will make our productions better. It will certainly make the audience experience of our space better. We’ve managed to carve out a particular way of working, though, which we have become known for in London, and I don’t think we will digress from that.
Tell me more about the new building. What are you excited about?
The space is going to be about 50 percent larger, so I am excited to be able to achieve bigger productions. When we designed The Yard in 2011, the brief I gave the architects was that the audience should feel like they are hugging the stage, and we are retaining that, but just making it larger. The bar is going to be a space for performance as well, which I’m excited about. We already do a lot of performance in the bar at the weekend, but we are going to make it more purpose-built for that. We are going to have a dedicated space for the young people we work with, too. We have not had that for a few years, since the community centres we worked in were knocked down. Having young people back on site again will be exciting. And I’m just excited to have a bit more stability. I have run The Yard during very precarious times, and to have a bit more certainty about our future will be a huge relief.
Take me back to 2011. How did The Yard Theatre come into existence?
It was only supposed to be a temporary space that existed for a few months. I masqueraded as a property developer who wanted to build a theatre and pretended I had loads of money to invest. I had absolutely zero money. I went to a charity shop and bought myself a tie to make myself look a bit more respectable.
I somehow persuaded people that it would be a good idea. I tried to develop this sense of inevitability. I tried to make it seem exciting and worthwhile. When you do something as stupid as starting a theatre, people just come along with you for the ride. I think the sheer naïve ambition of it generated enough excitement that it sort of took on a life of its own, and quickly became bigger than me. People always say this, but if I’d known then what I know now, I don’t think I would have done it.
The Yard has always been quite a cool theatre, with DJs and parties in the bar. Even your website is cool. Was that something you intentionally cultivated?
I’ve banned the word ‘cool’ here, actually. That was never the intention. The original idea was just that the bar should be as busy, if not busier, than the theatre. That was where the stranger, more exciting performances would happen.
I knew that, in developing a new, young audience for a theatre, it was easier to attract people to a bar where anything could happen, rather than asking them to pay £20 for a ticket to something they don’t know about. I think it has contributed to our image and brand, but it was never really about the aesthetic.
How is your model working at the moment? How does it all stack up?
Well, like most other theatres in the country, we have been cut to shreds. Our local authority funding was cut by six figures. We became an NPO in 2017, but that is only £150,000 a year, which is a fraction of our budget. Since Covid, our bar takings are down, just like they are across the hospitality sector because people are drinking less and being more careful with their spending, which has taken a toll.
Thankfully, our box office line has grown massively. We have really focused our programme, which has helped to develop a loyal community around our work. We have a young audience, too – 70 percent of our audience is under 35 – and it was perhaps less impacted by health concerns around going to the theatre after Covid. We have also taken some shows from Edinburgh and given them a real good go in London, which was not something we did as much pre-pandemic. They have done really, really well, though. That is something we will continue doing.
Tell me about your own journey. How did you end up founding The Yard Theatre?
I grew up in Newcastle. I didn’t really go to the theatre. I remember being dragged along to some boring plays at school, but that was about it. I thought I was going to be a musician. I thought I was going to be a music producer, actually.
What changed? Honestly, without wanting to get too personal, my mum was a novelist and she died when I was a teenager. Reading her books, getting closer to her when she was very ill, and developing a love of her writing led to me reading a lot more. I went on to do English Literature at Cambridge, which was quite a tough culture shift, but that was where I got into theatre. In my first week, I auditioned for a choir and a play. I didn’t get into the choir but I did get into the play.
I went to Lecoq after leaving university, just as a vehicle to live in a different country for a bit. I lived there for a few years, did a bit of acting, then moved to London, totally broke. Pretty quickly, I started The Yard. I slept in the bar at first.
You have run The Yard Theatre for fourteen years now. Would you ever move on?
Maybe, but I’m not really interested in that at the moment. I really enjoy what I do.
The Glass Menagerie runs at The Yard Theatre until April 21.
Five seminal shows at The Yard Theatre
Beyond Caring
Last year, Alexander Zeldin staged an acclaimed adaptation of Antigone at the National Theatre. He made his name ten years ago, though, with Beyond Caring, which premiered at The Yard Theatre, then transferred to the NT’s Temporary Theatre. Depicting the daily life of zero-hours cleaners in a meat factory, it was the start of a trilogy of real-time, ultra-naturalistic, desperately moving plays about modern Britain.
Big Guns
Playwright Nina Segal, one of the first people to ever be interviewed in The Crush Bar, had her second play, Big Guns, staged at the Yard Theatre in 2017. It was an intense, uncomfortable two-hander all about the disconcerting juxtapositions of humour, homeliness and horror on the internet. I really loved it.
This Beautiful Future
Rita Kalnejais’ kaleidoscopic two-hander was set in France in 1944, and focused on a teenage Nazi soldier and a French civilian in love. It was a bizarrely beautiful play, mesmerisingly staged by Miller in 2017. And it featured live ducklings, which, Miller has just told me, ended up being adopted and raised by video designer Sarah Readman.
The Crucible
The Yard Theatre’s first ever revival was a 2019 staging of Arthur Miller’s classic drama. What made it so memorable was Caoilfhionn Dunne as a gender-swapped John Proctor, Emma D’Arcy as Elizabeth Proctor, and Miller’s trippy staging, in which accents, costumes and props enigmatically slid around in time and geography.
The Flea
James Fritz, another former interviewee of this newsletter, had a hit at The Yard Theatre in late 2023 with a riotous re-examination of the Cleveland Street Scandal, an 1889 episode involving a gay brothel with royal connections in Fitzrovia. Sadly, I never saw it, but I heard great things, and it did so well it returned the following year.
What are your favourite shows from The Yard Theatre?
Thrillingly, you can let everyone know in The Crush Bar’s new chat…
Three shows to see next week
The Seagull - Barbican, until April 5
Cate Blanchett and Tom Burke star in a new version of Chekhov’s classic drama written by Duncan Macmillan and directed by Thomas Ostermeier. You can read my interview with co-star Priyanga Burford here and get tickets via the button below.
A Good House - Bristol Old Vic, until March 8
Amy Jeptha’s sharp satire of South African suburbia was a bit of a hit when it premiered at the Royal Court a few weeks ago, earning some glowing reviews. Now, it transfers to Bristol Old Vic, where you can also catch a transfer of babiriye bukilwa’s …blackbird hour next week. You can get tickets via the button below.
Death Of A Salesman - Pavilion Theatre, until April 19
The second Arthur Miller revival to open in Glasgow in a fortnight, this production from Trafalgar Theatres and Scottish producing duo Raw Material is directed by ex-Tron Theatre boss Andy Arnold stars David Hayman as Willy Loman. After a week at the Pavilion Theatre, it tours to Birmingham, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Dublin and elsewhere until early May. You can get tickets via the button below.
That’s all for this issue
That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all - just reply to this newsletter, or email me at fergusmorgan@hotmail.co.uk, or you can find me on Bluesky.
A reminder of the ways you can support The Crush Bar: you can share it, you can use it for promotional purposes, and you can become a paid supporter, which means you get an extra weekly email, Shouts and Murmurs, every Tuesday. There are currently 3886 subscribers, 100+ of whom are paid supporters. You can join them above.
Fergus
I really liked The Cherry Spaceship / The Spaceship Orchard by Vinay Patel in 2023.
What a great read with Jay Miler. I had no knowledge of The Yard, but now I really want to go there when it is rebuilt...