The lights may be out, but there is still somebody at home at the Bush where the demise of the theatre's lighting grid has engendered a glorious solution that typifies the inventiveness of British theatre. Broken Space is a three-week season of work - short plays from A-list writers such as Simon Stephens, Bryony Lavery and Neil LaBute, as well as offerings from rising stars such as Mike Bartlett, Lucy Kirkwood and Jack Thorne - that are performed either with domestic lighting or in semi-darkness.
So Declan Feenan's St Petersburg becomes, under director James Grieve, an almost site-specific piece set in the run-down flat of John, a retired lorry driver. John used to drive into the frozen wastes of eastern Europe, but his relationship with his daughter, Kate, a child conceived in heat, is now blanketed by the permafrost of the past.
Similarly, director Josie Rourke lends atmosphere to Anthony Weigh's spooky The Flooded Grave, an unsettling tale of madness and exorcism that is both macabre and comic, by staging it in only the revealing ray of torch light.
The best play is Simon Stephens' Sea Wall, a quietly gripping monologue about grief and belief performed in the dying light of a winter's evening. Andrew Scott is extraordinary as a man whose blessed life falls away to nothing, plunging him into the depths. The devastation is in the detail of the everyday: a pot of yoghurt, some athlete's foot cream. This play is like a deceptive calm blue sea beneath which lurks a ferocious riptide of sorrow.
