Lynette Linton: ‘I want to change the world. But I also want to entertain’

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Lynette Linton is on a roll. Shifters, a play she first directed at the Bush in west London — the theatre she’s been in charge of since 2019 — has just opened in the West End. Idris Elba, Maya Jama and Little Simz are supporting this new piece of black British writing by joining the list of producers. Granted, Linton admits that they are more like “ambassadors” for the show than thrashing out deals for it or sorting out catering, but still. It’s a vote of support for her and for the writer, Benedict Lombe.
Then, at the same theatre, Duke of York’s, in October she will direct the Anglo-American actress Lily Collins (Emily in Paris, daughter of Phil) and the Spanish actor Álvaro Morte (Money Heist) in Barcelona, a new two-hander by Bess Wohl. Oh, and there is a new Bush season to be announced in October, although she won’t be directing anything in it. She will, however, direct her third play by the American playwright Lynn Nottage, Intimate Apparel, at the Donmar Warehouse next summer.
Can the Bush keep her for long? Can she still run the theatre while busy in the West End? On the second matter, at least, she’s forthcoming. She has had previous experience: directing Blues for an Alabama Sky at the National in 2022 andClyde’s at the Donmar Warehouse last year. “And I’m never really away … there’s always three hours of emailing to do even if I’m working on something else … and it’s not all me, I’ve got an amazing team in place.”
She was approached to direct Barcelona before Collins was attached to it. When she came to meet Collins the “vibe” was good between them. What would have happened if it hadn’t? “I don’t know what the answer to that is, but she was really dope. You’ve got to click with the people you are working with.”
Linton has all sorts to be proud of in her five years running the Bush — including welcoming 50,000 people to shows there last year, a record for the theatre — but in box-office terms three shows stand out. One was Baby Reindeer, back in 2019. The Scottish comic and actor Richard Gadd was due to go on from his sold-out Bush run to the West End after that, but Covid intervened. “I read it, I had a chat with Richard and then I thought, ‘We’ve just got to f***ing do this.’ Very proud of him. Watched it on Netflix, loved it, inhaled it.”
The second, in 2023, was August in England, Lenny Henry’s one-man show about the Windrush scandal. “I learnt so much from working with Lenny,” Linton, 34, says. “It had a really serious message behind it, but you see someone like him and he is a master at knowing how to give people permission to laugh.”
And the third show, the reason we are sitting in the Bush’s studio space today, is Shifters. Lombe’s two-hander is not the first Bush show on Linton’s watch to reach the West End: that was Red Pitch, Tyrell Williams’s south London play. It is the first, though, to be directed by Linton.
“Shifters has a special space in my heart,” she says, “and I am so emotional at the moment seeing people come to it. It’s a love story. There are so few stories about black love, black British love, we are starved of them — a play with two dark-skinned leads loving each other.”
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Shifters is about two former childhood friends: Dre, played by Tosin Cole (Supacell, Doctor Who) and Des, played by Heather Agyepong. He is British-Nigerian, from a council estate. She is British-Congolese, the daughter of a neurologist. They are first loves whose relationship waxes and wanes over a decade or so. The day after it opened at the Bush in February it sold out its run. “Tosin being in Supacell is amazing but it’s not just that, the play has struck a chord.”
Little Simz went to see it, loved it. So did Jama. Elba got involved. Linton doesn’t know what the financial arrangements are, whether they are investing or on the payroll or doing it just for love — that’s strictly at a producer level, she says — “but it’s been really cool to see the impact they’re having”.
She’s proud to make work that’s political in scope. She’s every bit as proud to make work that doesn’t strain to make its point. “Yeah, I want to avoid that. I want to change the world. But I want to entertain.” So Shifters is not the first time she’s put on something akin to a rom-com: Waleed Akhtar’s The P Word and AJ Yi’s A Playlist for the Revolution also had strong elements of love story about them.
“Well, I love a rom-com,” she says. “People love rom-coms. We need love. It’s been a really tough few years. But romantic love is a continuous topic, a continuous need. That’s why rom-coms do so well. With Shifters, it’s so intense, they are so in love with each other, you leave the theatre in bits. So I push a little bit against the ‘com’ side of rom-com there. But also we love to have a night where you are crying with laughter one moment and crying with emotion the next. The best stuff does that, doesn’t it?”
Still in her twenties when she started at the Bush, Linton arrived with a mission to do only British and Irish work, only new writing. There would be “a particular focus” on black and Asian artists too. “I spoke quite openly about trying to disrupt the canon. This idea of what British theatre is, it is a lot of revivals of stuff we’ve seen a hundred times before. Which is all valid, and I’ve learnt a lot from those. But where are the new plays? Bene [Lombe] is only the third black British woman writer in the West End ever, right? Which shows you how far behind we are.” (Natasha Gordon with Nine Night was the first and Yasmin Joseph’s J’Ouvert the second.)
Red Pitch did well, but Linton knows the West End is not a money machine. “Not all, no. It’s good for business, great for profile, but in terms of maintaining this building, they are two separate things. We still need to raise half a million a year to keep things going here, and that’s really hard.”
Directing shows in the West End, running a theatre … this is nothing she imagined for herself as a girl growing up in Leytonstone, east London, the child of a black father from Guyana and a white mother from Northern Ireland. “I got interested in theatre quite late. I was interested in reading, in EastEnders.” It wasn’t until she went to the University of Sussex to study English that she started getting involved in theatre. She joined the National Youth Theatre. Then, on a scheme in east London with the writer and director Rikki Beadle-Blair, she started to find her voice as first a playwright, then a director.
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She was working in the food hall at John Lewis to get by, but slowly theatre became her full-time job. She became an assistant director at the Gate in Notting Hill, at the Donmar, for Michael Grandage Theatre Company. Then she directed a drama school show that so impressed Josie Rourke, then running the Donmar, it led to Linton directing Nottage’s Pulitzer-winning play Sweat.
“Josie thinking I could handle such a huge play was amazing. And then she said, ‘OK, you need to meet Lynn.’ So they flew me over to America, and the first time I was ever in New York it was to meet Lynn Nottage. It just changed my life.”
Sweat went from the Donmar to the West End in 2019. At around the same time, she applied for the Bush job. Sweat had given her the confidence to know she could handle knotty work and a big cast. And while she’s not sure she will ever get over her sense of being an impostor — “Does anyone? Does Beyoncé? How high up do you have to go? I think it’s just a function of being human” — she’s learnt to live with it.
When she took over the Bush, she had a quote from the American writer James Baldwin put on the wall: “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.” She smiles at the thought. “I believe in that so much. We have to go, ‘I belong here. I should be in this space.’ And that’s why it’s so moving to me that Shifters is in the West End.”Shifters is at the Duke of York’s Theatre, WC2, to October 12, shifterstheplay.co.uk. Barcelona is at the Duke of York’s, October 21 to January 11, barcelonatheplay.com