‘We don't want just bums on seats’: how the Yard, London’s coolest theatre, was reborn

Fifteen years ago, Jay Miller decided to build a theatre. The Newcastle-raised director had recently returned to the UK following a stint at Parisian conservatoire L’École Jacques Lecoq, and he was bored, broke, and ambitious.

“I wasn’t getting any jobs and I was frustrated,” Miller remembers. “I just thought it would be easier to start a theatre myself than get a job in one, so I went looking for spaces.”

Miller’s search for a spot to start a venue involved some subterfuge: he bought a tie from a charity shop and posed as a property developer, rather than a theatre director. When he found a suitable site – a disused warehouse in an industrial estate in Hackney Wick in east London – he went about obtaining permission to turn it into a theatre in an unconventional manner, too.

“They were paying for 24-hour security, so I said I could sleep there instead,” Miller says. “I found out how much they were paying by getting a quote from the security firm, then I sent them an email saying: ‘Look, you’re spending thousands for a person to sit in a car with a dog. How about I wipe that bill away for you and look after the building at the same time?’”

Thus, the Yard theatre was born. Using volunteer labour and reclaimed materials, some of which was scavenged from the Olympic park in Stratford, a 110-seat auditorium was constructed on a shoestring from scaffolding, planks and plastic chairs, with a similarly sustainable-chic bar next door. Launched in July 2011, and originally intended as a three-month pop-up opening, it existed like that for over a decade.

Within London’s crowded theatre scene, the Yard quickly carved out a niche. Its appeal and economic model were rooted in presenting edgy work from emerging artists alongside cabarets and club nights, both of which attracted a young, cool crowd. Audiences would watch strange, striking shows then decamp to the bar to discuss, drink and dance.

Writers including Nina Segal and Josh Azouz had early work staged at the Yard and have gone on to have plays produced at major theatres including the Royal Court and the Almeida. Actors including Emma D’Arcy and Ncuti Gatwa performed there before they became household names in blockbuster series. There were radical revivals of The Crucible, The Cherry Orchard and The Glass Menagerie. Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum Dreams began life at the Yard then transferred to the National Theatre. Alexander Zeldin’s Beyond Caring did similarly, catapulting the theatremaker’s unique, hyper-realistic style onto bigger stages.

If anything unites the Yard’s programming over the years, Miller says, it is a sense of a live experience. “It is essential, to me, that in a world where we are constantly fed stories on multiple platforms, the one unique thing that theatre has is its liveness,” he explains. “It has to be experienced within a period of time on one evening, and it has to be difficult to capture on screen.”

Last year, the Yard closed for a £7m redevelopment. The original structure was demolished and a new one designed by Takero Shimazaki Architects has been built in its place.

The new theatre has double the capacity of the original and improved technical facilities – “We’re not going to have to run extension leads across people’s laps any more,” Miller says – plus an expanded bar and cafe, a space for young artists, improved dressing rooms, and a six-storey chimney emblazoned with the venue’s name, visible from afar.

Sustainability, again, was key: the chimney is a natural ventilation device and low-carbon materials have been used throughout, including colourful bricks made from recycled waste. “Often, sustainable projects embrace an austere aesthetic,” Miller says. “We’ve been exuberant. We’ve gone all in on colour. We are showing you can live sustainably and have fun.”

The performance space itself, Miller adds, evokes a different vibe to its pop-up predecessor. “The first theatre played with temporality,” he explains. “It was deliberately itinerant with scaffolding and plastic chairs. The new space is playing with permanence. We’ve built an amphitheatre with the aesthetic of concrete with an exposed wooden roof. It’s like we’ve put a roof on something that has been there forever, like Epidaurus. I hope we’ve made a space that has character, and that actors and directors and designers will love to bounce off.”

The Yard’s reopening season is as eyecatching as its colourful bricks. It began in July with anarchic company In Bed With My Brother’s hit show Philosophy of the World and the premiere of Malmö Dockteater’s filthy, doll-based adaptation of Jackie Collins’s novel The World Is Full of Married Men. On now is a revival of for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreopoem that blends movement, music and monologue to examine misogynoir, which has had its run extended due to high demand. Then, in November, Sir Ian McKellen will return to the stage in a riff on King Lear co-created by Miller and playwright Simon Stephens.

“Ian came to see The Glass Menagerie,” Miller says of this casting coup. “We got on. I pitched him a few ideas – some Chekhov, some Beckett – which he described as intensely boring.”

The idea that piqued McKellen’s interest was inspired by his most recent stage role as Falstaff in Rob Icke’s Shakespeare combo Player Kings in the West End in 2024. During one show, McKellen fell off the stage, spending three days in hospital with a chipped vertebra and a fractured wrist. Lear at the Yard will be his first major theatrical performance since then.

“It is both a documentary about why Ian needs to act and why he is getting back on stage after falling off it at the age of 87, and the story of Lear,” Miller explains. “It is about two men at the end of their days, reckoning with what it means to do what they do. We’ve been working on it for 18 months now. We all live within 15 minutes of each other, which is handy.”

Miller is keen to stress, though, that one of Britain’s most celebrated theatrical knights performing at the Yard does not herald a change of direction for the boundary-breaking venue.

“We will work with excellent actors whether they’re famous or not,” he says. “We want to work with people at the top of their game and make the best theatre in London, but we don’t want to do it in a formulaic way just to ensure bums on seats. We want to do it with meaning.”

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Fergus Morgan is an arts journalist and critic specialising in theatre. He is based in Edinburgh, writes regularly for publications across the UK, and publishes his own substack about theatre called The Crush Bar.