Recently the Arts Council considered (among other cuts) reducing the Bush Theatre's funding by 40%, but luckily they have changed their minds. That they should even have considered such a move is indicative of how corrupt they have become. Under Margaret Thatcher, a consumer-goods-production criterion began to be applied to culture, and this has continued during the last ten years under Labour. Of course money is necessary for the arts as well as for business, and success in business 'may' often be quantifiable. The aim can reasonably be increase in output of a particular product, and in the desires of potential cutomers; 'more 'of an increase in product and desire than other competing businesses produce. But this sort of criterion cannot 'literally' be applied to the arts, for how does the metaphor cash out? Are the audience to count as customers or as products honed by the performance they have witnessed? Is the success of a theatre merely to be measured by the amount of bottoms on seats multiplied by the amount of nights they are seated?
       There are only eighty-one seats in the Bush Theatre, its runs are of limited duration, so should a large well-earning strip club or pornographic cinema perhaps be awarded funding instead? The whole point of the Bush, anyway, is that it does more than put on plays - it also has a reputation for discovering new voices. Stephen Poliakoff's 'Hitting Town' and 'City Sugar' in the seventies, local playwright Simon Bent's brilliant 'Goldhawk Road', and 'Serving It Up' by David Eldridge, were some among the many innovative plays first produced in this tiny intimate setting that makes for compelling, often darkly claustrophobic drama.
       It is indicative of the Bush Theatre's reputation that the successful American playwright Neil LaBute should stage the London premiere of his two latest plays there, and it is indeed the ideal venue for them. The perennial LaBute themes of encroachment and alienation, lethal power struggles between men and women in the confined private space of marriage and home, or publicly marooned at the café table or in the office, are perfectly suited to the Bush.
       'Land of the Dead' and 'Helter Skelter' are each two-handers that uncomfortably juxtapose conception and misconception, pregnancy and murder, using the mobile phone, which supposedly enables greater intimacy, to symbolize miscommunication and the concealed masculine world. In the first, a man and woman (John Kirk and Ruth Gemmell) each conduct an alternately spot-lit monologue, each of them alienated and super-scrutinized by the light. It gradually transpires that they are recounting a well-remembered day on which the woman is reluctantly having an abortion. In the man's case the light takes on the role of an interrogator as he mumbles and fudges his way through his all too obvious moral shortcomings. He had decided not to accompany his wife (or girlfriend) to the abortion clinic, but instead have breakfast with his boss and go early to his office in the airy realms overlooking New York. But when the intrusive light goes off him, it is to the sound of an aeroplane roaring and explosions. The sound is mixed forever in the woman's mind with the abortion's suction sound-effect, but her own suffering has been both dwarfed and enlarged by the 9-11 disaster.
       Or has it? Hasn't Labute in fact cheated, hi-jacking a larger tragedy in the interests of amplifying his own? It could be said that he is tackling the sentimentality surrounding 9-11. Ordinarily shoddy people were suddenly spot-lit by the drama of it; shabby relationships, like the one he depicts, were all at once lifted into splendour; mediocrity was meretriciously dignified. A good point, but he himself is going in for the sort of phony capitalizing on catastrophe that he impugns.
       In the second play, it is the pregnant woman (Ruth Gemmell again) who herself manouevres the tragedy, seeking to make a predictably banal infidelity into something blazingly heroic. But this too is the theatrical equivalent of Roald Dahl's 'Tales of the Unexpected 'where beastliness in the final twist is the rationale for the story, and the author makes his characters puppets for his own cruelty.
       Not that the actors 'seem' puppets. Rather, they give these plays a depth they do not deserve, Ruth Gemmell in particular. Her delicate pregnant wife, absently stroking the baby in her distended abdomen while scintillating with brittle vindictive laughter, is simultaneously moving and terrifying. Once again, whatever the playwright's shortcomings, the Bush establishes its credentials for giving us real theatre in the midst of dross.
Jane O'Grady