What a year it’s been for the Bush. It lost then won back its Arts Council funding, and now it’s working in semi-darkness because a series of leaks have left it unsafe for ordinary use. Well, let’s hope the Arts Council doesn’t get any funny ideas about new standards in Fringe frugality from this, but the Bush’s Broken Space Season turns diminished resources into a memorable event.

In a changing line-up over the next three weeks, you can see three short plays a night: specially commissioned work from Simon Stephens, Bryony Lavery or Neil LaBute alongside a one-act play by Declan Feenan and half a dozen new ghost stories.

Feenan’s St Petersburg plays so intimately that you feel like an intruder. With the audience on three sides of the bedsit set, street light pouring in, Geoffrey Hutchings’s stooped Ulsterman mourns his fading prospects and long-lost marriage, speaking first to his silent grandson, then to Mairead McKinley as his middle-aged daughter.

The vivid tone gives us faded hopes — “old bastards need to be heard, there should be a forum for boys like us” — but there’s more tone than story. Alfred Hitchcock described drama as “life with the dull bits taken out”. Here, as they butter bread and bang on about soup, the boring bits are carefully left in. The dialogue, acting and staging are wonderfully lifelike, but a short play feels long.

By the time you read this, Anthony Weigh’s graveside monologue The Flooded Grave will have ended. Played in torchlight, the stage covered in fresh sod, it’s another victory of atmosphere over event, well acted by John Ramm though it is.

But get to the Bush by tomorrow and you’ll see a simply stunning opening monologue by Simon Stephens. His Harper Regan at the National was one of the best new plays of the year, but Sea Wall is as tender, gripping and unsettling as anything he has done.

The story of an accident on a family beach holiday in France, it uses Hitchcock’s dull bits — mentions of athlete’s foot creams, the sort of vanilla-flavoured yoghurt you can’t get at home — to root a story of love and loss that flits between distant and recent past but always keeps moving forward to its sobering end.

Andrew Scott is exceptional as the deceptively casual narrator: conversational, poised, wounded, he’s an ordinary man telling his terrible story, not an actor in pretend pain. In only about 20 minutes he and Stephens give us a whole world, and then yank it back away from us.

Box office: 020-7610 4224

Editor's choice

• Vote for the Breakthrough Award winner
• David Tennant back as Hamlet after back surgery
• Matt Smith is the new Dr Who