Guest Blog: Chris Sonnex, Artistic Director of The Bunker, On WE ANCHOR IN HOPE

By: Sep. 16, 2019
Get Access To Every Broadway Story

Unlock access to every one of the hundreds of articles published daily on BroadwayWorld by logging in with one click.




Existing user? Just click login.

Guest Blog: Chris Sonnex, Artistic Director of The Bunker, On WE ANCHOR IN HOPE
We Anchor in Hope at The Bunker

You arrive, maybe with friends, you buy a drink, you sit down in a communal space, and a host of people enthusiastically perform stories. I'm not talking about theatre - I'm talking about pubs.

Pubs are inherently theatrical, not just in the occasional drama of a lovers' tiff or a sports-related argument, but also in the ritual of attending. As a young boy, I grew up in and around pubs, watching and listening in awe. It gave me a sense of theatre before I even really knew what theatre was.

When I was artistic associate at The Royal Court Theatre, I worked extensively on the Beyond The Court programme. It aimed to engage communities with theatre and the arts in a way that the people felt they needed or wanted. I decided it was a perfect time to delve into the world of pubs once again.

Pimlico, where We Anchor in Hope was conceived, is not only the area I grew up in, but also has a remarkably high percentage of pubs for quite a small part of London. A lot of them when I was young were for the working class, but had changed and morphed into different entities when we revisited them: some had become gastropubs or restaurants, and others had just completely gone.

Guest Blog: Chris Sonnex, Artistic Director of The Bunker, On WE ANCHOR IN HOPE
Director Chris Sonnex in rehearsal
for We Anchor in Hope

I wanted to find out more about these shifts, but also really wanted to engage in pub culture and see how we could genuinely and honestly translate the similarities with theatre into something more tangible - merging two places (theatre and pubs) that didn't have the same customers and audiences, but shared so much else.

I commissioned Anna Jordan to go into all the pubs in the area, buy people drinks and talk to them, sharing in their stories over a pint. At that point, neither of us knew what the outcome of this would be - whether anyone would talk to her, and whether the clientele would engage with theatre in any way if we made some.

But they did: they engaged in droves, and not just for the free drinks. Anna ended up writing this brilliant fictional play, a state of the nation play that wasn't a state of the nation play, written in the tumultuous time between the Br*xit vote and an orange fella being voted into the White House.

It's a play written for the people she met, steeped in authenticity and people's stories; a love letter to the people she met, the stories that were told and to pub culture in general. When we put it on for a script-in-hand run in a pub in Pimlico for three nights, the audience were the people that we engaged, some of whom had never been to the theatre before in their lives. It was a moment that will stay with me for a long time.

I always approached community and youth work with the mentality that it should be made like you were creating something for a main house in an established theatre: that there is no difference between them. Theatre is theatre, no matter who it's made for. With We Anchor in Hope it always felt like the play deserved a future life, that the quality and love it was made with should have its chance to soar as high as any other play, so it was a really easy decision to programme it at my new home at The Bunker Theatre.

I'm really excited to turn the Bunker into "The Anchor" over its run. I hope the audiences, whether they are regular theatregoers or seasoned pub punters, come in, buy a drink, sit in our communal space, and watch while we enthusiastically tell Anna's story of the last night of a London pub.

We Anchor in Hope at The Bunker 25 September-19 October

Photo credit: Tom Scurr, Helen Murray



Videos