Theatre and performance in Greater Manchester & other places.
Royal Exchange, Manchester. 20 - 22 July 2018. CO:LAB is the Royal Exchange's annual festival showcasing works-in-progress by "the next generation of North West theatre-makers". The weekend-long event is part of the theatre's Open Exchange talent development programme and it provides local artists with an opportunity to test out their work in front of a [...]
Royal Exchange, Manchester. 9 & 19 July 2018. After a recent stint on the Royal Exchange's main stage as a spinning Winnie in Sarah Frankcom's production of Happy Days, Maxine Peake is back again, although this time as the writer of Queens of the Coal Age. Taking us deep underground, her play reimagines the true [...]
Royal Exchange, Manchester. 19th June 2017. Written and Performed by Pauline Mayers. By the Mayers Ensemble 'How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?' Nina Simone. Inspired by those words, Pauline Mayers' What If I Told You challenges us to reflect on our times through her own story. There is to be no [...]
Royal Exchange, Manchester. 16th June 2017. Powder Keg's new work 'Bears' is a carefully calibrated but passionate response to climate change. Taking steps in development to minimise the production's carbon footprint, the set is created from 100% recycled materials, the programme is only available as a download and on the way in the audience are [...]
Royal Exchange, Manchester. 1st June 2017. Let's first of all acknowledge how much fun the foam party is and then just move on. That such an orgy of hedonism should occur in a Jane Austen adaptation has left a lot of people frothing at the mouth with excitement. Yet there is so much more to [...]
Royal Exchange, Manchester 15th May 2017 In the middle of a blue-green floor, adrift on an island of sand, a rickety timber construction looms overhead. Upon this island Viola is washed ashore after a shipwreck in which her brother is presumed to have died. She disguises herself as a man and confusion and intrigue unfold. [...]
Royal Exchange, Manchester 11th May 2017 Look - no hands! From this unlikely premise writer Alan Harris draws us in to the story of two lonely people discovering one another through telephone sex line chat. Jimmy works in a drive-through doughnut restaurant and Kitty is a voice at the end of an adult chatline. Beneath [...]
30 March 2017. Royal Exchange, Manchester. A doomed love affair between Zeus, a god, and Io, a woman turned into a cow, may be the stuff of Greek legend but this tale of their descendants feels as if it has been cut and pasted straight from today's news sites. Like a dispatch across the centuries [...]
Circles & Stalls 