2023 on the North West stage
North West theatre has seen quite a few changes during 2023, and not all of it has been good news.
We lost one theatre, as Oldham Coliseum closed its doors for good at the end of March, although the fight to reopen it instead of attaching the name to a new theatre—which has yet to be built and that the action group has said is totally inadequate—is ongoing, with lots of enthusiastic support from locals, theatregoers and celebrities. Former Artistic Director Chris Lawson will take over as CEO at The Dukes in Lancaster from January.
However, we gained another theatre as Factory International, the company behind the biennial Manchester International Festival, finally opened with a bang with Danny Boyle’s hugely spectacular Matrix-based dance show, although the building was renamed to Aviva Studios in order to get the money it needed to complete the works.
After the Royal Exchange’s joint Artistic Directors left after a fairly short time in post, the theatre announced that it would drop the role of Artistic Director entirely, replacing it with management roles that have no part to play in directing plays with directors brought in from outside.
A month later, Contact announced it was also dropping the Artistic Director role, but, more worryingly, also said it would be reducing its programming as well. The venue has suffered from its four-year closure for a much-delayed building project, worsened if not initiated by the COVID lockdown, and now has to deal with increased running costs for its refurbished venue.
Hope Mill has decided that it can no longer produce work at the scale it wishes just for its tiny venue and so will be presenting some of its shows in other local theatres. The Octagon seems to be continuing as it always has to a large extent, although most of its programme consists of co-productions with other mostly northern theatres. This does mean that there is, sadly, little excuse for me to visit Theatre by the Lake in Keswick in the foreseeable future as most of their programme I can see in Bolton, more than a hundred miles closer to home.
While we don’t have a regular reviewer in Liverpool, I made my way there a few times later in the year to the Royal Court, where you can choose to have a meal in the auditorium as part of the package, and to the temporary venue at The Depot, where Ralph Fiennes debuted his Macbeth before taking it to the capital cities of England, Scotland and the USA.
The following summary is based only on the shows I saw myself during 2023, and so isn’t by any means a complete picture of theatre in the North West over the whole year, but should give a flavour of what was happening in the region. You can find different perspectives from some of my colleagues in their picks of the year, and of course you can always find the latest news and reviews from the region on the North West page.