Producing theatres
Royal Exchange Theatre
The Royal Exchange Theatre never reopened its doors last year after its world première production of Rockets and Blue Lights by Winsome Pinnock was closed by the first lockdown on what should have been its press night (the play opened at the National Theatre in August 2021). The theatre finally reopened, in its 45th anniversary year, on 23 June, but rather cautiously, its first productions on its main stage being two solo shows and a two-hander.
Opening Roy Alexander Weise and Bryony Shanahan’s first season as joint Artistic Directors with a bang was a tour-de-force semi-autobiographical piece directed by the latter from the supremely talented Lauren Redding, Bloody Elle: A Gig Musical, for which she wrote and performed the script and all of the songs. Stuart Slade’s Bruntwood judges’ prizewinning script for Glee and Me wasn’t as polished but had an interesting way of dealing with terminal disease in a teenager that was never glum or miserable and featured a great performance from Liv Hill.
Weise responded to the Black Lives Matter protests of last year by putting online his production of The Mountaintop by Katori Hall, set in a Memphis hotel room in 1968 where Dr Martin Luther King Jnr is spending his last night alive, in June 2020. He brought it to the Royal Exchange stage this year, recast and performed in rep with Glee and Me.
The final production of the year was a strange choice for the festive season and I would imagine not an easy one to sell. Playwright David Greig always produces something interesting and unexpected, but this production of The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart never really came together for me, always seeming on the verge of saying something profound that it never quite delivered, but the live soundtrack from multi-instrumentalist Malin Lewis was pretty special.
The Exchange’s new mobile theatre (I wonder what happened to the old one) was resident at Spinners Mill in Leigh in August, featuring performances, workshops and other events, including a reimagined version of Bloody Elle.
In September, it was announced that the biennial Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting—in essence a revival of the theatre’s highly successful Mobil Playwriting Competition of the 1980s sponsored by property company Bruntwood—would open for entries in January 2022, when the judging panel would also be announced.
Octagon Theatre
Octagon Artistic Director Lotte Wakeham was finally able to welcome audiences to the theatre for the first time after more than two years in the post in May, nearly a year after it had been scheduled to reopen its greatly renovated theatre building, for a very short monologue featuring the people of Bolton, See you at the Octagon, written by local writer Becky Prestwich. It was also my first time inside a theatre building for over a year.
I saw the first full production, a version of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles in that now-familiar madcap style with a small cast playing a lot of characters, a week after press night after getting caught up in the ‘pingdemic’. It was a polished production with enthusiastic performances all round, but ‘social distancing’ isn’t good for comedy and being in a thinly scattered audience sniggering occasionally behind masks may have contributed towards my feeling that it didn’t seem funny or sharp enough overall (although an e-mail I got in response to my review disagreed strongly).
That certainly wasn’t the case with Laura Wade’s Home I’m Darling, a co-production with Theatre by the Lake and the Stephen Joseph Theatre directed by the former’s Artistic Director Liz Stevenson, which seemed funnier to me than the National Theatre production that visited The Lowry in 2019 while not shying away from the more serious issues.
To finish the year, Wakeham directed Sarah Punshon’s adaptation for just five actors of Peter Pan, which was great fun with appeal for all ages.
Hope Mill Theatre
While much larger theatres with Arts Council funding and commercial sponsorship reduced the scale of their productions or closed completely for much of the pandemic period, Hope Mill seems to have remained active in one way or another all year.
Last year, the venue inaugurated its LGBTQIA+ festival Turn On Fest as an annual event, which was able to continue this year after having to be postponed in January by going online in March, headlined by writer Russell T Davies in conversation with Julie Hesmondhalgh. Its play reading club, meeting on the last Friday of each month, continued to meet over Zoom after lockdown and this year celebrated its third anniversary.
It was claimed that HER Productions’ Meet Me at Dawn was one of the first plays in England to open after lockdown, which David Cunningham called “a mature and moving production and a fine way of welcoming back one of the region’s best venues.”
Hope Mill Theatre School was launched in June in a new community space next to the theatre that will also double as a 40- to 50-seat studio space for performances, rehearsals and other events. The theatre also launched a three-week festival, Hope Fest, in a 250-capacity tent alongside New Islington tram station in Ancoats in summer.
While this may seem like a venue filled with youthful energy, its Act Your Age New Writing Festival in August was a showcase of plays containing characters predominantly over the age of 40.
HER Productions returned in June with the second of its Vignettes collections of new plays written and directed by women and in October to once again team up with Unseemly Women and Girl Gang Manchester for another all-female Shakespeare production, this time of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
After some partially successful attempts at staging it last year, Hope Mill finally managed a full run of Jonathan Larson’s Rent in August and September in a joyful staging by Luke Sheppard. The year ended with The Wiz, a 1970s take on The Wizard of Oz told through black American popular culture, updated and staged by Matthew Xia, which may not always have been strong on storytelling and in the dialogue but packed a punch with its songs, dances and sheer energy.
That last production had 14 performers on stage and 8 in the band—that’s 22 freelance performers employed for a 7½-week run. I can’t imagine many regional theatres would want to risk that at the moment.
Oldham Coliseum
The Coliseum reopened in September with Tanika Gupta’s Love N Stuff, a pleasant enough comedy but not particularly notable or memorable.
The Christmas panto Aladdin by Fine Time Fontayne and Chris Lawson finally appeared after being postponed last year, and offered what Oldham audiences have come to expect from the Coliseum's usual festive offering.
The theatre again presented its Advent Plays online, with a new short festive play appearing on its social media channels each day from 1 to 24 December.
Theatre by the Lake
The loss last year of its summer season, which usually has the same plays running in rep from just after Easter right up to November, must have been devastating for Theatre by the Lake, especially when its Christmas production of The Borrowers also had to be cancelled.
In March, the theatre announced a digital programme comprising Spark, a series of rehearsed readings, and Open Space, the scratch night of untested work that began live at the theatre in 2019. The theatre’s Young Company also took its weekly workshops online.
The theatre building finally opened with a couple of co-productions: Home I’m Darling by Laura Wade, directed by Artistic Director Liz Stevenson, with the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough and the Octagon, Bolton in October and Jacaranda with Pentabus in November.
Contact
After closing in December 2017 for a major redevelopment of its building—its second in less than 25 years—Contact had already passed its original proposed reopening date of summer 2019 long before the pandemic hit without any word about when audiences would be invited to return.
The theatre finally reopened in October 2021 with Contact Young Company’s Everything All of the Time, directed by Artistic Director Matt Fenton, followed by mandla rae’s as british as a watermelon for Black History Month. For Christmas, Contact dipped a toe into the world of panto with Dick Whittington and His Amazing Cat.
However, it was announced in November that Artistic Director Matt Fenton was to leave the theatre after 8 years and Head of Creative Development Suzie Henderson was to leave after 14 years, the latter to become Creative Director at Storyhouse in Chester.
The Dukes
The Dukes opened to the public in May with a season of mostly short runs of visiting productions, but with a two-week run of Sleeping Beauty written and directed by former Artistic Director Sarah Punshon and Daniel Bye. The annual outdoor summer production in Williamson Park this year, after a two-year break, was an adaptation by Andrew Pollard of Grimm Tales; our reviewer David Upton said of these park productions, “it’s maybe only after their extended absence that you appreciate their joyful importance.”
In August, a new season was announced to celebrate the venue’s 50th anniversary that included newly commissioned work focussing on Lancaster and some visiting productions, with celebrations continuing until summer 2022.