North West

David Cunningham

Lord knows in 2022 I was grateful for any live entertainment to get me out of the house, but after a while began to wish for some drama among the feel-good musicals. This year, there is a welcome level of drama but not much comedy. Can’t please some people.

2023 was a weird year for Manchester. The city gained a new arts venue and the promise of an opera company (although no-one really seemed to want the latter) but also a nationwide reputation for rowdy behaviour. One half expected shows to start with the announcement “Seconds Out, Round One…”.

One might question the artistic decisions made in the city. Sheffield Theatres, having previously developed Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, this year toured their remarkable version of Life of Pi. Manchester closed a city street so celebs and the elite could slum it at a posh fashion show well beyond the financial limits of most Mancunians. Can’t help but feel Sheffield has the better attitude in creating art for its residents rather than trying to attract the wealthy.

While some theatres chose to keep their intimate ‘studio’ theatres in darkness, HOME and Contact dusted them off and delivered some very rewarding drama. Yusra Warsama’s Of All the Beautiful Things in The World moved Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba from 1940s Spain to present-day Moss Side and was a challenging and rewarding production featuring exceptional performances.

If You Fall, a remarkable achievement in verbatim theatre from Nir Paldi / Ad Infinitum, was a tribute to families and carers coping with unbelievable stress and to those defiantly demanding to be identified as people not just patients. Whilst primarily intended for young audiences, Hot Orange was a highly satisfying examination of the impact of peer and parental pressure upon friendship and developing sexuality. Rory Aaron’s This Town was an affectionate and moving tribute to the residents of a town in decline.

Whilst the Royal Exchange had a successful Romeo and Juliet in Manchester dialect, HOME led the way with drama. Jack Holden’s Cruise treated larger-than-life characters with empathy and insight and evoked a battered feeling of achievement and defiance by surviving against the odds. There was a career best from Will Young in his solo performance in Song from Far Away conveying a real sense of loss and of growing self-awareness.

A number of shows in 2023 were hard to classify. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was a full-cast production but felt like a three-hour monologue from Kathryn Hunter in the year’s most outstanding performance. Free Your Mind was less a dance than a mission statement intended to show audiences what could be achieved in Manchester’s much delayed, massively over budget but still very impressive new arts venue. Of course, it turned out we’ve been calling The Factory by the wrong name all this time and it is actually Aviva Studios. Who knew?

Kimber Lee’s untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play was a deliberately provocative examination of depiction of Asian women in western entertainment which managed to be very funny while making a serious point.

The best play for very young children was undoubtably Will Brenton’s adaptation of Lost and Found, which achieved the difficult goal of simply keeping children engaged in rare style.

On the fringe, Young Love was not just an excellent play but also a stunning demonstration of the rapid progress made by Dare to Know Theatre from single person monologues to a large-cast production in which movement was as important as the script. This time next year, they’ll probably offer something on a scale with Hamilton.

Room 5064 Productions’ version of Steven Berkoff’s East was swaggeringly ambitious and showed what can be achieved on the fringe. Joe Leather’s Wasteman took a refreshingly irreverent approach to the theme of self-discovery and was not only entertaining but life-enhancing, while Rik Barnett’s Bosie was a great play with a superb performance examining the life of an unworthy subject.

Dance was dominated by a revival of Akram Khan's Giselle both harrowing and cruelly spectacular. However, Message in a Bottle and Peaky Blinders: The Redemption of Thomas Shelby may have attracted new audiences to the dance genre by blending high art with popular culture.

42nd Street was a glorious reminder of the razzmatazz of the heyday of showbiz and Hamilton actually lived up to the hype. The biggest musical surprise was, however, dusting off the old warhorse Jesus Christ Superstar in a vivid production that showed why it made such an impact when first staged.

David Chadderton

For a fuller reflection on theatre in the North West over 2023 from me, see North West theatre in 2023. Here are some of my highlights of the year, in no particular order and not only in this region: