Even These Things review – mapping Manchester’s history, from a Victorian fist fight to the IRA bomb
Royal Exchange, Manchester
Rory Mullarkey’s play, expertly directed by James Macdonald, is a bold attempt to encapsulate a whole city in decisive events from across three centuries
The theme of the Royal Exchange’s 50th anniversary season is “a homecoming”. But whose home do they mean? Who lives here? Who belongs?
Is it, for example, the heavily pregnant Annie Donovan, an Irish immigrant who, in the Manchester of 1846, brushes shoulders with Friedrich Engels on her way to a fist fight? Incomer or not, she acts as though the place of the fight, St Michael’s Flags and Angel Meadow Park, is hers to inhabit. The 40,000 people buried beneath the flagstones of this former cemetery would presumably have felt the same.
At Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 15 June
المصدر: The Guardian — Stage
