‘It was high chaos’: the death and rebirth of London’s coolest theatre

Of all the new theatres to open in London this century, none feel so vital as the Yard. Built in just a few weeks in 2011, from reclaimed materials – including some dubiously acquired scaffold planks and unwanted lino scavenged from the Olympic development – the Hackney Wick venue was billed as a pop-up when it opened with an eccentric programme of theatre that bore little resemblance to anything being staged elsewhere in the city. Early shows include a jokey micro-budget adaptation of John Bunyan’s epic Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress (A Progress), a show about the mathematical phenomenon of emergence (Game of Life), and a 40-minute opera about a samurai rampaging through an old people’s home (Manga Sister).

Emerging in a then-desolate corner of east London alongside various other cultural start-ups and club nights, founder artistic director Jay Miller set up the theatre on a shoestring because it seemed cheaper than the alternatives. ‘I graduated during the last recession,’ he says. ‘There were hardly any opportunities, I couldn’t afford to live in London and I naively thought it would be easier to start a theatre than to get a job in one. The Yard was my last-chance saloon’. 

Since then, the Yard has not only survived but thrived, gaining Arts Council funding and playing a pivotal part in the launch of the careers of the likes of Michaela Coel, Ncuti Gatwa and director Alexander Zeldin. Late at night, it also serves as a pretty great night club: the auditorium becomes a dancefloor for an eclectic series of late-night parties.

It’s a model of what a modern grassroots theatre can be, and now it’s about to embark upon its next chapter – following its current production, a Miller-directed take on Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, it will close its doors, be torn down and built anew in a more durable and high tech building. After all, it was never intended to last this long, and it isn’t really fit for purpose for what the theatre has become – there isn’t even a backstage area.

The last show in the theatre as we know it is on May 10. On the eve of the old Yard’s destruction, Miller reflects on the theatre’s past, present and future.

What was your vision for the Yard when you launched it?

‘The truth is that in the first year there was no business plan, there was no sense of what precisely it was that I wanted to do with it. It was more just following an instinct and impulse and a bunch of energy. Fundamentally I was really frustrated [about lack of opportunities in London theatre at the time] and really bored, and so that energy – rather than intellectual rigor – defined it.’

Well it worked!

‘Yeah! But I didn’t realise how difficult it would be.’

Can you give a flavour of what the early days were like?

‘It was high chaos. I slept in what are now the toilets for a few months because the door shutter wouldn’t close and because I really couldn’t afford rent. We got some money for a little garden from a lovely charity and unbeknownst to us people started growing weed in it. Every Friday a man would phone up asking, really politely, if he could turn up naked. We thought about it for a while and in the end I was like: no, that’s probably going to make other people feel uncomfortable.’

Was it always the plan to have clubbing as part of the Yard’s programming? 

‘I moved to London in 2010 and it felt like the height of [legendary avant-garde club night] Shunt. I only went once, but I thought it was absolutely brilliant, and I was really inspired by the idea that you could give people a different context by which to engage with experimental performance. If that involved booze, then cool, if that involved a dance, then cool. And being in Hackney Wick and wanting to attract a younger generation of artists and audiences, I knew that would be a fundamental part of the offering. We started doing parties pretty much immediately.’

Do you feel you’ve ‘made it’ now? The Yard’s future seems reasonably assured.

‘I mean, the truth is that I never feel like that. I’ll have at least one or two nights a week where I don’t sleep because I’m worried about what’s around the corner, it never feels secure. It’s not a world in which it’s possible to feel secure: we make ephemeral art and so the ephemerality of it translates to the business and the way in which the budgets are constructed.’

What will the new Yard be like?

‘My hope is it will be the same spirit, but the offer to audiences and artists will be better. We’ve been operating in a tin can: when it’s cold outside, it’s cold inside. When it’s hot outside, it’s hot inside. There’s no backstage area. We’re not adjusting the style, the taste, the spirit of what we do and who we are, but we are hopefully ensuring that we’ll be able to deliver that in a more exciting way, in a more comfortable way and in a way that ensures that the shows and the experience of those shows is better.’

We’ve been operating in a tin can

Hackney Wick has changed enormously in the last 14 years: how do you feel about it? Do you see yourselves as gentrifiers?

‘When we opened we were a group of artists making theatre in a cheap part of London. We moved in, and others moved in too. But it is impossible to escape the contemporary relationship between art and residential development. People want to live near artists. Was that our intention? Absolutely not. We just wanted to make excellent new theatre. Do I regret making excellent new theatre? No. Can I influence the cost of flats around us? No. We’ve worked hard to get to know our neighbours. We'’ve worked with local young people for ten years on a weekly basis. We started a partnership with our local primary school – I rehearsed Glass Menagerie at Gainsborough School. What hasn’t changed is that Hackney Wick remains a place people go to have a good time.’

Read more: an interview with Ryan Calais Cameron, Britain’s new writing superstar.

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