Even These Things
- Robert Beale
- 42 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Rory Mullarkey
Royal Exchange Theatre Company
Royal Exchange, Manchester
15 May - 15 June, 2026: 1 hour 55 minutes
“No interval! Three acts and no interval!” exclaimed one member of the thespian guest list as he dashed into the gents after the show. Well, we were warned.
But it was right that there wasn’t, and sitting in a theatre for a shade under two hours isn’t that onerous. Even These Things is a one-off, a custom-made play that could hardly be transferred and will probably never be revived – its world premiere at the Royal Exchange surely a highlight of the theatre’s 50th anniversary season, and involving a community cast of 108 participants from across all 10 Greater Manchester boroughs (and four children’s choirs in total). It even ends with “Let’s go home,” a line to echo the theatre’s birthday tagline of A Homecoming.
The springboard for it was awareness that at almost this time 30 years ago, the second (and bigger) Manchester IRA bomb went off in Corporation Street, just by that red postbox next to Marks and Spencer. Almost everyone in the audience who’s old enough will remember what they were doing when they heard (or heard about) it. The bang was audible 15 miles away.
Writer Rory Mullarkey has created a central section that tells the story of that morning, moment by moment, in a kaleidoscopic succession of tiny reenactments of ordinary life in and around the city – and this is where the community cast (and children) come most vividly into their own – followed by about as realistic an impression of a huge explosion as you could achieve in a theatre space without hurting anyone.
Director James Macdonald and his team’s production is extraordinary, and extraordinarily good: there’s no set, really, but an ingenious evocation by costumes and props of the details of life 30 years ago, to match Mullarkey’s writing. As a Manc by adoption, he has an uncanny mastery of the life we lived then.
The minutes of that morning tick away; we hear the police helicopter hovering overhead; we see the Arndale Centre stores being cleared of shoppers and their lights turned out, and realise why there were just a few people left close enough to sustain some injuries. He doesn’t need to tell us the facts that the old Arndale Centre was half-demolished, and the roof of the Victorian Royal Exchange in which we were now sitting physically shifted sideways, for us to realise just how murderous it might have been.
It didn’t matter that the show had a couple of technical glitches last night – the one bit of clever kit, a “Ford Granada” interior with an electric motor, refusing to budge after it made its entrance – almost everything else was worked by plain human hands.
Around this graphic reconstruction there’s an implied message that Manchester has something unique when it comes to confronting the worst life throws at us. It’s as if “Manchester” is more a concept than a geographical place (its boundaries are notoriously ludicrous, as the script points out). After the explosion, we hear a rush of vox-pops on the sound system, of people saying why they think it’s special.
But the first and final “acts” take it further, picking up at first on the city’s 19th Century Irish roots and finally bringing us to the present day. Elaine Cassidy, in an amazing Royal Exchange Theatre debut, delivers a 35-minute monologue to open the show, as the character Annie Donovan, a fighting woman of Angel Meadow - the area near the River Irk where thousands lived in poverty and it’s believed 40,000 were buried. The section is set in 1846 and makes mention of “German Fred” – known to us as Friedrich Engels, the author of The Condition of the Working Class in England, which was based on his exploration of the slums of central Manchester. He’s not on quite such sure ground here: sixpence for a box of matches seems unlikely, when it would have bought six pints of beer in a pub back then.
The last act brings back Elaine Cassidy as Kaz - still Irish, but now a Manchester single mum whose father, despite being in the British Army, had a tough time of it. She is chatting to Jenny (Katherine Pearce – another superb performance), a young woman looking to return to Manchester from London, when they meet in today’s Angel Meadow, near all the high-rise apartment blocks near the Irk. Both actresses have been narrators in the central act, and Fionnuala Dorrity has been seen, hilariously, as the Piccadilly statue of Queen Victoria coming to life.
Threads of what it is to be Mancunian, what the trauma of the 1996 bomb meant for some who experienced it, and what we feel about the Irish, are picked up and woven to a conclusion of hope. It deserved its standing ovation.
More info and tickets here
