Old Bridge, The Bush

[londonpostie]

I hovered over the buy button for this but so very glad I went along; a completely engaging 2-hours of roller-coasting theatre - even this miserable old goat was drawn in by the emotional depth and range. Certainly endorse this review:

theartsdesk.com/theatre/old-bridge-bush-theatre-review-powerful-poetic-and-profound

Much credit to the hard-working, genuinely talented cast playing engaging characters off polished, very well paced writing; they all deserve more!

Fwiw, The Bush have a £10 offer on the website which I'm pretty sure guarantees a very good seat.

Top tip: if you have the choice come out on the Metropolitan and City Line to Shepherds Bush MARKET station, you will come out opposite the theatre (I think that also applies to the Circle but it's not exactly on the Circle, so do check).

Otherwise, obv. Shepherds Bush station on the Central - the bonus point here is the Greggs doesn't close until 8.30!!

Highly rec: five poloroid photos out of five.

[showgirl]

Agree this is worth seeing. I saw a preview 2 weeks ago but even then it was utterly engrossing; felt like an epic and received an instant standing ovation at the end. Normally I dislike plays with lots of lyrical narration but in this case the narration worked well for me. And yes, I recommend the £10 (Count Me In) seats - I never book anything else here since as londonpostie suggests, the view will be fine from anywhere. As the seating configuration tends to change with each production, you couldn't base seat choice on previous experience anyway.

Travel-wise, I've usually come from somewhere else in London after a matinee so probably via the Central Line, which is definitely much more of a walk but probably only a brisk 7 or 8 minutes away. Any spare time beforehand I spend in Westfield as it's under cover, has toilets and lots of catering outlets if you want those; also a few seats not tied to cafes and restaurants though these are oversuscribed. Going back I walk to the overground station just east of the Central Line tube as it's only a few stops to Clapham Junction so for those living south of London, much quicker than 2 tubes back to Victoria or Waterloo via central London.

[Dave B]

Popped this in the quick reviews thread a few days ago. Didn't quite enjoy it as much as you did postie but still!

Old Bridge - Bush Theatre.

The young cast are all excellent and bring a nice extra level to a story which has a lot of potential but doesn’t quite work. The main emotional impact being built around the physical bridge rather than the characters - so that didn’t land so well (no pun intended). Some really nice bits of dialogue and for a play written pre-Covid, some very pertinent thoughts on living with a change in the world really jumped out. Don’t get me wrong, we enjoyed this and it’s well worth a look, it just feels like it had the potential to be a little more.


Since then I saw this on Twitter, footage of the destruction of the bridge itself -

[samuelwhiskers]

Agreed. I thought this was a fantastic play.

[londonpostie]

This is ending its run at The Bush on Saturday - still urging people to go along for a tennner if they want a proper rollercoaster of an evening.

Also glad to see it will now be streaming so if you fancy a gander ... www.bushtheatre.co.uk/event/old-bridge-online/?

[barelyathletic]

I saw this last night and thought it was excellent. Very engaging characters and a powerfully moving story. Several people in floods of tears during the second act. I thought the cast and production were very strong even if the direction was perhaps a little fuzzy at times. But I bought the script to clarify a few points. My knowledge of the civil war in Bosnia is perhaps not what it should be. Hard to believe this is a debut play. A really good evening out at the theatre.

[Forrest]

I saw this tonight, and didn't enjoy it as much as most on here: to me the script felt... I am missing the exact word for it, but a few times I caught myself thinking: "nobody talks like that", and neither the characters nor the actors (aside from Sasha, who I really liked) didn't really grab my attention. I also found the narrator kind of distracting, and her language also frequently felt unnatural to me.
I did like the design and the direction, I thought they got a lot out of the quite minimalist setting, but that didn't save the play.

I think perhaps my main issue with it was the simplified "romanticization" of the characters: at times the love story felt like something out of a telenovela, rather than watching two real people, they felt a bit "hollow" to me.

But admittedly, that might just be me: the setting of this is quite geographically close to me (and somewhat in terms of lived experience), so perhaps it will always seem a little too "simple".

[londonpostie]

I was hoping to get back to this to check my memories but the handful of seats are at £30. If I can I try to keep to a habit of making notes of good new work and so I'll put up my abbreviated note instead:

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler - click to view}
A fully engrossing, well-honed and smartly paced work by first time writer Igor Memic ,delivered by a hugely impressive cast of 5, plus an old bridge. To be fair they could have used Hammersmith Bridge given its current condition but let’s not go there (locals: we don’t!).

So, why did this win a notable prize ..

As former-Communist-former-Yugoslavia pulls apart we witness the historic and seemingly multicultural town of Mostar spiral from ageless idyll to asymmetric hell. Our narrator, Mina, is the sole survivor of a group of four friends, and we view events through her subjective lens, her memories. Inevitably then, as a memory piece, Mina is at the centre of events - we see only her relationships to everyone else.

There is one more layer of perspective. There seems to be a parallel suggested between Mina with her unborn child and our writer Igor Memic who left Bosnia with his mother as a 2-year old in 1992. Of course we don’t know if fictional Mina travelled to London but we do know she had an Aunt here (the phone calls), that the new-born daughters name was anglicised to Millie. The London Aunt is all the family we are told about.

I wondered if what we experience is the memories of Memic’s mother as told to, and represented by, her son. It is how families pass their stories through generations.

Mina’s remembrances tell of a cultural landscape of Muslims and Catholics and Jews and Croats and Serbs and Bosnians and … it’s a jumble out there. The physical landscape includes surrounding mountains with winds rushing though and, traversing a deep gorge and unifying what would otherwise be divided, the old stone bridge: heel first, toe second, and as old as Shakespeare, they say.

There’s an inevitable sentimentality, as well, about time, place and people (who doesn’t do about that one perfect summer) that feels almost memorialising.

One thing we also learn about conflict is it matures the hell out of relationships: in two years this group went from George, Andrew, Pepsi and Shirley to the family in Die Harder.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the writing is how none of the countless tribal or political cans of worms are allowed to cloud the author’s central aspiration.

I read the play as a love letter to a time and a place and a culture and a tolerance and to friends who won’t have polaroid memories because it ended for them as they searched for their mother, protected their pregnant partner from sectarian madness, or their closest surviving friend from a hillside sniper.

A love letter but also perhaps a testament to youth, to Journey’s End, a Remembrance, in Europe, in what is now the EU, not much more than 30 years.

[londonpostie]

The t-shirt from London had said Choose Life.

I like the bit at about 2:20 when George goes out of his way to include school friends Pepsi and Shirley >>

[Dave B]

Tower Theatre (one of the few London theatres that I've not yet been to) are putting this on 8 - 18 March.

www.towertheatre.org.uk/old-bridge/

[londonpostie]

Well I'm in. Thanks Dave.

Not sure this is a fully professional production (though it obv. involves professionals!). I might be wrong, and frequently are.

Good to see it back - I had hoped to see it a second time at The Bush but things didn't work out.

Worth remembering that, having initially won the PapaTango, it later became an Olivier Winner- hurrah!

[samuelwhiskers]

Tower Theatre are an am-dram company, though they do high quality shows.