The Bunker’s Spring Season 2018
The Bunker, 53A Southwark Street London SE1 1RU
Wednesday 17th January – Saturday 26th May 2018
The Bunker’s Spring 2018 season sees the venue truly celebrate its place as a playground for ambitious artists and adventurous audiences, just over a year after it first opened its doors. The bold season, including works by Terry Johnson and Izzy Tennyson, highlights the venue’s commitment to work with exciting playwrights, both established and emerging
The Bunker’s ethos encourages audiences to stay in the auditorium long after performances have ended, offering the opportunity for audiences to mingle with artists. In this vein, the venue is committed to keeping its work accessible to its core audience, expanding its Under 25s £10 ticket offer to now include all under 30. For the Spring Season, The Bunker will also unveil its new entrance area, which will be freshly decked and refurbished, with a brand new bar area serving craft lager and ales on draught for the first time.
The season opens with Ken, written by Olivier and Tony award-winning writer Terry Johnson, which transfers from Hampstead Theatre following a riotously successful run in their Downstairs studio last year. Ken pays tribute to the truly original and unclassifiable Ken Campbell – maverick writer, theatre director, and legendary practical joker. Following this, DumbWise Theatre reinvent Electra,
reimagining this murderous Greek myth of power and prophecy as a lyrical modern epic with a live punk-rock score.
Artistic Director Joshua McTaggart will direct the world premiere of Devil With The Blue Dress by Kevin Armento, a play that interrogates the infamous Monica Lewinsky Scandal. This five-strong female cast play also marks The Bunker’s first American production. The season concludes with Izzy Tennyson’s Grotty, which offers a dark and savage journey that digs beneath the surface of lesbian subculture in London.
Joshua McTaggart, The Bunker’s Artistic Director, comments, It is incredibly exciting to announce The Bunker’s spring 2018 season – our first season of fully curated work since we opened our doors back in October 2016. In the past year we have discovered so much about our space, our audience, and our artists, and these four shows reflect the height of what we want to be doing at The Bunker in
bringing ambitious artists and adventurous audiences together into our shared space. From Terry Johnson’s celebration of the life of the experimental theatre-maker Ken Campbell and an actor-musician led punk-rock version of Sophocles’ Electra, to two world premieres: Kevin Armento’s exploration of Hillary Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Grotty, Izzy Tennyson’s dark drama exploring this city’s lesbian subculture from Damsel Productions, we have lined up a Spring season that demonstrates the full breadth of artists and their work that has found a home at The Bunker since we opened.
The Bunker’s Spring Season 2018 is as follows:
Ken (The Bunker in association with Hampstead Theatre)
Wednesday 24th January – Saturday 24th February
Press Night: Monday 29th January, 7:30pm
1978, London. A 23 year old aspiring playwright in a rundown flat-share off the North End Road is wrestling with his masterpiece for the Royal Court. The house phone rings, the young man answers… a call for the person who used to occupy his room, recently moved to Amsterdam. But even once this information is imparted, the man at the other end refuses to hang up. His name is Ken. And
he’s about to change the young man’s life forever… Directed by Lisa Spirling, Artistic Director of Theatre 503, Ken is the retelling of an extraordinary friendship from beginning to end, replete with wickedly funny anecdotes, magnificent hoaxes, and general chaotic lunacy – all infused with the spirit of the great man… Terry Johnson and Jeremy Stockwell reprise their roles following a sell-out run at Hampstead Theatre to bring to life Ken Campbell’s wild and idiosyncratic perspective on life.
Electra (Dumbwise Theatre)
Tuesday 27th February – Saturday 24th March
Press Night: Thursday 1st March, 7:30pm
A Queen masterminds the murder of her Husband and takes the throne with her new lover. Her Daughter, Electra, grows up in the grip of a cruel regime, swearing revenge. Her Son Orestes, exiled as a boy and raised in the arms of the rebels, waits to embark on a holy mission to reclaim his country. Two decades later a twist of fate brings Brother and Sister together; united by hate but divided by faith. With the country on the brink of civil war, the most powerful family in the Kingdom are torn apart from the inside as their dark past once again becomes the present. The revolution will be televised, but are The Gods watching?
Devil With The Blue Dress (The Bunker Theatre and Desara Bosnja)
Thursday 29th March – Saturday 28th April
Press Night: Wednesday 4th April, 7:30pm
What do a First Lady, a secretary, a daughter, a confidant, and an intern all have in common? This barbed spin on a political drama conjures the five women who collided in what became known as The Lewinsky Scandal. Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky find themselves centre stage in a theatrical feat that takes us through the corridors of power and behind the closed doors where the abuse of that power took place. Slyly exhuming the little blue dress that launched the biggest media circus of a generation, Devil With The Blue Dress, written by Kevin Armento and directed by Joshua McTaggart, grapples with one of the most challenging questions in American political history: How do we respond to women seeking power?
Grotty (Damsel Productions)
Tuesday 1st May – Saturday 26th May
Press Night: Thursday 3rd May, 7:30pm
Welcome to the desert. The London lesbian scene. A couple of little sad old basements that drip with sweat and piss. We sit there, listening to second-hand pulsating noise coming from some gay boy night upstairs. And it’s a Wednesday. And it’s a night called the ‘Clam Jam’. Can you imagine being straight and going to a night called the ‘Cock and Hole’? The women in black. The best tables are marked theirs by a crowd of empty prosecco bottles. They sit there in their uniformed black, a deep rich black only lots of money can buy… and they are looking at you. They are not nice girls. But this is not a nice story. Grotty is a dark, savage, and unflinching exploration of lesbian subculture in London. Written by award-winning writer Izzy Tennyson (Brute, Runts, Career Boy) and directed by Hannah Hauer-King (Dry Land, Brute, Fury), Damsel Productions presents this fierce new lesbian drama that takes no prisoners.