With venues and companies changing how they are managed or where they perform and one that had apparently closed for good announcing its reopening, productions cancelled and uncanceled and quite a range of shows, from the fringe to large-scale tours, there was plenty happening in the Manchester theatre scene in 2024. Here is my selective summary of some of the high- and lowlights.
Royal Exchange Theatre
The Royal Exchange started the year well with a vibrant première staging of Bruntwood top prize-winning play Shed: Exploded View by Phoebe Eclair-Powell, followed by a strong revival of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey and Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat, plus a largely successful modernisation of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.
After announcing that it would not be appointing anyone new in the role of Artistic Director after the departure in 2023 of the previous joint holders of that post, Roy Alexander Weise and Bryony Shanahan—who took over in 2019 but whose first programmed season was not until 2021, post-COVID—the Royal Exchange appointed the former Artistic Director of the Gate in Dublin, Selina Cartmell, into new role of Creative Director from September. Chief Executive Stephen Freeman said in December 2023 that this new role, “will not be about getting in the rehearsal room and making shows. It will be about devising strategies and programmes of work that respond to our audience and contemporary challenges”.
There was some speculation that a lack of communication between the rehearsal room and the theatre’s management was a factor contributing to the thing that, sadly, the theatre will be most remembered for this year, and perhaps for some time to come: the cancellation of its production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at a very late stage in rehearsals. Some great reporting from The Stage uncovered reasons for this, even though the theatre was keeping quiet and not responding to requests for information, no doubt hoping it would all blow over. The director of the production, Steph O’Driscoll, did, however, issue a statement that sparked a lot of anger towards the theatre; when the theatre’s own statement eventually came with an explanation that may have been perfectly reasonable, it wasn’t enough to make the headlines that the previous stories had made and it came too late to sway most people’s opinions.
This cancellation meant that the opening production in the autumn season was another Bruntwood prizewinner, Bullring Techno Makeout Jamz, and certainly a worthy one, but it didn’t get the full production that Shed was given. Instead, this was a touring production from Paines Plough that only visited the theatre that presented the writer with the £16,000 top prize in 2022 (you can hear playwright Nathan Queely-Dennis speaking to us immediately after being presented with the award in the BTG podcast) for four midweek performances, one a matinée.
The Christmas production was a revival of the musical Spend Spend Spend, which was well-staged and a lot of fun. Overall, the Exchange had a pretty decent year in terms of its productions, but this has been somewhat overshadowed by the offstage goings-on.
HOME Manchester
HOME also had some controversy in 2024, which, like the issue at the Exchange, revolved around what the theatre’s management was comfortable saying about Gaza and the conflict in the Middle East. A performance in April of Voices of Resilience was cancelled quite suddenly, but the protests from artists and performers forced them to reconsider. The show was later restaged at the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Barbican in London.
While HOME is now largely a receiving house for small- to mid-scale productions—the Library Theatre, which joined with Cornerhouse cinema to become HOME ten years ago, was an acclaimed producing theatre for more than half a century whose absence is still felt in the Manchester theatre scene—it did have its name attached to a couple of productions this year, including the Christmas show, Miracle on 34th Street, and the première on the main stage of Work It Out by local writer Eve Steele.
I personally didn’t see many of the visiting productions, but one of my highlights of the year was Emma Rice’s adaptation of Blue Beard for Wise Children, a company that will return to HOME in April 2025 with Rice’s take on the Hitchcock film North By Northwest. I can’t wait to see how she stages it.
Contact
Contact followed the Royal Exchange at the end of 2023 in announcing that it would drop the role of Artistic Director, with its incumbent, Keisha Thompson, stepping into a role of Director of Contact Events, a company owned by the theatre in charge of hiring spaces and consultancy, for one day per week.
While there have been no updates to the news pages on the theatre’s web site since announcing a new Chair of the Board, Bella Ikpasaja, in February, there is an up-to-date appeal for donations on the homepage, although there are fewer than half a dozen productions listed for the first half of 2025, all but one running for just one night.
Octagon Theatre Bolton
While other theatres in the region have been fighting scandal and funding crises, the Octagon, though undoubtedly affected by the same financial issues as all theatres, seems to have just quietly got on with putting shows on stage, apparently successfully, which says a lot about the management of the theatre by Artistic Director Lotte Wakeham and Chief Executive Roddy Gauld. They are even making use of their studio theatre again, something the Royal Exchange hasn’t done since before lockdown other than for entertaining VIPs.
In recognition of their success, the theatre won the award for Medium Business of the Year at the 2024 Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce Excellence Awards and Wakeham won the Women in Leadership award at the SheInspires Awards and was nominated in the Power List and Agent of Change categories at the 2025 Northern Power Women’s Awards.
The productions in 2024 (and 2025) were almost all co-productions and quite were few are small-cast adaptations of literary classics—most out of copyright—which may be seen as compromises, but it seems to be working for them.
The year started with a rather wordy dramatisation of Animal Farm that must have gone down well as it returns to open the 2025 season before a short national tour. Other literary adaptations over the year were Northanger Abbey and Dracula: The Bloody Truth, the latter from Le Navet Bete, a company that specialises in this type of show.
Little Shop of Horrors is one of the great musicals, and director Wakeham did it full justice with a joyous production. Another major highlight of the season was Stones in his Pockets directed by author Marie Jones’s son, Matthew McElhinney, in a version revised for its 25th anniversary in 2021.
There was also a production of Brassed Off, ten years after it was last at this theatre, and the year ended with an adaptation of The Jungle Book.
Oldham Coliseum
There was some surprisingly positive news from Oldham in July when it was announced that the Coliseum Theatre would reopen, more than a year after it was said to have closed its doors permanently. The Council reversed its previous decision to try to push the company into a new building that protesters claimed to be inadequate for the needs of a modern theatre and were very visible at the event outside the venue for the big announcement on 8 July, as was actor Julie Hesmondhalgh, who has been a prominent campaigner for the reopening of the theatre along with her scriptwriter husband, Ian Kershaw.
The Council has committed £10 million towards the refurbishment of the building, which is scheduled to be open in time for the Christmas panto at the end of this year.
Hope Mill Theatre
Now coming up to ten years old, Hope Mill is no longer the new kid on the block, with an impressive list of past productions, a fast-growing national reputation and, it seems, top musical theatre stars lining up to appear there. However, it has outgrown its space in Ancoats, announcing at the end of 2023 that it would be presenting some of its shows at other theatres in the region. And so its Christmas production of A Christmas Carol, with music by Alan Menken, was staged at The Lowry.
However, it hasn’t abandoned its home in the mill completely. Early in the year, it staged the première of Jim Cartwright’s The Gap, which attracted a lot of celebrities to the audience to add to the two on stage, but I was grateful not to have had to pay the high ticket prices for this very short and not particularly great play. It also brought back its production of Lizzie The Musical just over a year after it was first staged there.
The Lowry
The Lowry will celebrate its 25th birthday in 2025, having been opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 12 October 2000. In 2024, it published the findings of a report it had commissioned that concluded the venue generates £90m per year for the Salford economy and that its outreach programmes are the equivalent of another £22.4m in value. Every £1 of public funding generated a return of £32.91, according to this report, but still, funding the arts isn’t considered a worthwhile investment by politicians—or rather not a vote-winner.
I didn’t see much at The Lowry in 2024, but there was an interesting take on Frankenstein from imitating the dog (co-creator Andrew Quick spoke to us for the BTG podcast about this), a partly successful adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette and—one of my picks of the year—a stage revival of the '90s satirical sitcom Drop the Dead Donkey that reunited all the surviving members of the original TV cast.
Aviva Studios
Aviva continues on its mission to bring the type of productions we usually see in the biennial Manchester International Festival throughout the year, combining the local with the international and often mixing genres and artforms on its huge stages.
What we get ranges from the innovative to the baffling, sometimes both, but this is a venue that puts its ample resources into productions unlike anything else available in the region.
Former Royal Exchange Artistic Director Sarah Frankcom's latest in a long line of collaborations with performer Maxine Peake, which added Imogen Knight to the team, based on John Bowen's TV play Robin Redbreast, an early folk horror story and precursor to The Wicker Man, was titled Robin/Red/Breast. While it touched on elements of the original, this was not a piece that could be followed as a conventional narrative and had its own agenda to follow.
Robert Wilson is generally firmly in the often baffling category, but an adaptation of Kipling’s Jungle Book for a young audience promised something different, though this also eschewed traditional storytelling with Wilson’s usual slow-moving visual art that I’m not convinced would have kept the attention of many six-year-olds (it was billed for ages six and over) for its full hour and a quarter running time.
Dark Noon came to Manchester as a hit of the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe, and gave an intriguingly fresh look at American history through the lens of the western movie (co-directors Tue Biering and Nhlanhla Mahlangu spoke about it for the BTG podcast), while Death Songbook saw Suede lead singer Brett Anderson collaborate with Charles Hazlewood’s Paraorchestra for a one-nighter of songs from the likes of Echo and the Bunnymen, Depeche Mode and, of course, Suede which were supposedly about death, though the theme was stretched a bit at times.
Fringe
JB Shorts presented its 24th and 25th editions in 2024 at its current home of 53two in Manchester. To mark the fifteenth anniversary and the 25th outing of the biannual evening of six short, brand new plays, two stalwarts of JB who were there from the beginning, Trevor Suthers and James Quinn, came on the BTG podcast to talk about how it all came about.
David Cunningham has summarised the best of the Manchester fringe scene, of which he is a big fan, much better than I could in his contribution to our group article on the highlights of UK theatre in 2024.
However, we have both picked out the production of David Mamet’s American Buffalo directed by former Octagon Artistic Director David Thacker at The Kings Arms in Salford as something very special. Thacker is returning this month to direct Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, which has got to be the first must-see of 2025.