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Dateline: 25th November, 2010
Library Theatre Company to Share New Home It has just been announced that Manchester's Library Theatre Company will abandon its plans to take over the historic Theatre Royal on Peter Street in favour of a brand new £19m arts complex on First Street shared with independent Manchester cinema Cornerhouse, which has also been looking for a larger home. The Library Theatre Company moved out of the basement of Manchester's Central Library that had been its home since it was formed in 1952 to make way for major refurbishments of the whole of the Manchester Town Hall complex. It has since embarked on a programme of work at The Lowry in Salford and has recently announced that it will perform Charles Dickens's Hard Times as a promenade piece in an old mill building in Ancoats, Manchester next summer. The 1845 Theatre Royal building, which became a cinema in 1921 and is currently a night club, was the intended final resting place of the company after major refurbishments had been carried out. However artistic director Chris Honer told us yesterday of some of the problems that had come to light with this plan: "It became clear that the Theatre Royal site was going to be more expensive I think than anybody had thought. It also became clear that in terms of our plans, our aspirations for the developed Library Theatre Company, it would be a very tight squeeze to fit into it all the spaces that we wanted." The company was looking for a larger auditorium and better stage, backstage and front of house facilities than their previous home, which the Theatre Royal could have offered, but it also wants better facilities for catering, rehearsals, education projects and alternative performance spaces. Manchester's leading independent cinema complex Cornerhouse had also been looking for a new home with better facilities and Honer had discussed the possibility of a joint project with Cornerhouse director Dave Moutrey a couple of years ago, but "that hadn't come to anything at the time, but suddenly, like the planets in 2001, these things lined up." According to a statement from Manchester City Council, the new building will contain, "up to five cinemas, 600 square metres of contemporary gallery space, a 500-seat theatre and smaller studio/education space and an outdoor performance space as well as an impressive café and state-of-the-art back of house facilities" but Honer said they are still compiling the wish list of exactly what they want their new home to feature. "We know that we want an auditorium that seats between 450 and 500 so that it retains the intimacy of the Library Theatre, which is what people loved about it, but also enables us to sell a hundred or so more seats every night. We know we want a space where we can do more informal performance—we're keen not to call it a 'studio theatre'—and we know we want, which we never had at the Library, a space where you can have education and community events going on." There are also plans for collaboration with Cornerhouse on programming and education projects. The new building will be within easy walking distance of Greenroom, Bridgewater Hall and Palace Theatre, giving the potential to create a cultural hub in the southern edge of the city centre serving a very broad audience. The current plan is for the new Library Theatre to have its opening season in spring 2014. David Chadderton
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