It is this impact that writers Laura Mooney and James Yeatman turn to in their exploration of the early 19^th century Luddite rebellion in Manchester.

At the start an actor tells us to view the piece as verbatim theatre, where the dialogue is all based on factual-information sourced from letters, handbills and newspaper articles. Where there are gaps, we’re told they’ve improvised. If only they hadn’t, because it feels the gaps are filled with little more than FFS expletives, losing the authenticity of the original voices. This is a shame, because there is a strong story in here and it is ambitious of the Royal Exchange to stage it.

The stage is bare except for a raised red slope across the centre, on which everything is an uphill struggle for the weavers and mill workers. The opening, with the use of microphone stands to transport us to a new world via sound, feels like we’re in a rehearsal workshop. However, once we’re tuned in and let our imaginations run, Naomi Kuyck-Cohen and Joshua Gadsby’s design becomes absorbing.

There is a Light demands a lot from its audience. There are no character names and yet there are identifiable people, some of whom are recorded as being hanged for their part in the Luddite movement. The mix of modern and period dress forces us to draw comparisons with the digital revolution of today. However, portraying Luddites wearing baseball caps and anoraks, while swaggering with hands down their pants, leaving go of their genitals only to smash windows, does little to express the depth of desperation these men felt at having their livelihoods taken from them with no other means to survive. Starving and destitute they wrote to a Parliament that didn’t allow them the vote. To compare that Regency period to today’s government feels unnecessarily divisive and laboured, broad-brushing the Luddites once again.

The cast take on a variety of roles, each at one point donning a heavy overcoat as the mythical Nedd Ludd. The play leaves little space for character development, but Katie West, as open and naïve mill worker, Clem encapsulates the struggle of the times, bringing genuine emotion and humanity to the stage.

It’s striking that even those, like Clem, who appear to move with the times by joining the legions of mill workers don’t benefit from the progress. Technological advances create a different job market, but it’s one that concentrates wealth into the hands of the few. The Luddites knew this in 1812 and sadly, this timely production reminds us, a fair wage for a fair day’s work is something we still need to fight for.

There is a Light that Never Goes Out: Scenes from the Luddite Rebellion is at The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester from 25 July to 10 August 2019.

Claire Gaydon explores the pros and cons of digital sharing.

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Originally set in Europe’s 30 years war of the 17th century, Jordan turns the clock forward to 2080 where war is raging once again across Europe. The continent is unrecognisable from the country boundaries we now know; divided into a grid where there are two warring factions, Red and Blue.

Mother Courage, however, sits with neither; switching allegiance depending on circumstance. What’s clear from the outset is her real allegiance is to herself and her three children. For her family’s survival she’ll hawk her wares to profit from anyone’s misfortune.

Here the story is little changed. Although there is talk of nuclear weapons, war is still up-close fighting with towns and villages destroyed by rampaging soldiers who rape and pillage to take control. There is a sense of the never-ending drudgery and desperation of dispossessed populations, drifting from place to place.

There is no technology that tells us we are in an advanced age, no cell-phones or Internet for Mother Courage to contact her son during a rare outbreak of peace – no sense society has learned from past misfortunes or has moved on.

As time progresses little changes. The stage revolves to an eclectic soundtrack from Jim Fortune. There are occasional haunting and beautiful melodies, but for the most part even the singing is harsh and distorted.

Joanna Scotcher’s stark and grubby design makes us question as a society how much our humanity has developed. Is the updated language with its foul-mouthed, four-letter harshness, all that distinguishes the characters from those who struggled through war centuries before?

But although set in war, the play’s relevance is deeper, reflecting on the dehumanising forces of a society that puts profit before people. Here Mother Courage demanding payment for her water during an attack is a direct reference to Starbucks charging for water needed to help victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack.

Julie Hesmondhalgh is a confident and vibrant Mother Courage. Her trusty shop cart is an old ice-cream van, which she leaps over the bonnet and through the open-windscreen to get into. She’s an opportunist, who sells whatever people want to buy. Perhaps once it was ice-cream, now it’s bullet-proof vests. Soon it will be sex, burgers, booze and weapons. When asked if she’d sell to terrorists, she replies: ‘Yes, I would.’

In many ways, Julie Hesmondhalgh has too much natural warmth to play such a world-worn character. But her likeability also makes the complexity of her character more harrowing to watch. In her Mother Courage we understand the basic human instinct for survival. Humour is part of this and Hesmondhalgh captures this dark comedy with a steely wit. When a soldier eyes-up her daughter saying: ‘Your daughter is ripe for the picking.’
She quickly replies: ‘And your balls are ripe for a kicking.’

The quick-witted, sharp-tongued Mother Courage emerges as a product of her times, but as each character responds in their own way, we’re left questioning the moral choices they face. Rose Ayling-Ellis is heart-breaking as her sensitive, mute daughter, Kattrin, while Hedydd Dylan offers an equally heart-wrenching glimpse of female desperation as wild-eyed, prostitute, Yvette. The men too are complexly drawn. Simeon Blake-Hall and Conor Glean display both young naivety and vigour as her two sons Swiss Cheese and Eilif; Kevin McMonagle’s minister is both cowardly and brave, while Guy Rhys is an instantly recognisable charmer as wide-boy chef.

These characters draw us into their dystopian world and in them we see a dark reflection of our own. It is a thought-provoking evening that shines a light on greed and profit to make Brecht’s 1941 play as relevant and provocative as it ever was.

Mother Courage by Bertolt Brecht, a joint production by The Royal Exchange Theatre and Headlong Theatre is at The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester from 8 February – 2 March 2019.

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This summer, the Royal Exchange Theatre’s Young Company is staging a promenade production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest at Abraham Moss School in Crumpsall.

The comedy provides an accessible introduction to Shakespeare’s works for teens. It is performed solely by young people aged 15-25 who take the audience on a strange and mystical journey through the deserted corridors of Abraham Moss as they search for the truth hiding in this school. And although light-hearted on the surface, it’s themes of betrayal, magic and revenge explore deeper issues of freedom, power and forgiveness.

It’s Shakespeare, but not as you know him, and director Nickie Miles-Wildin is enjoying the challenge the school setting brings. “School means so many things to everyone – it’s where we grow, find out who our friends are and who we really are,” she says. “The end of it can feel liberating, bewildering, like the end of the world. The Tempest allows us to explore all those things in a magical mischievous setting.”

Nickie’s own version of Miranda was seen at the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Paralympics opposite Ian McKellen’s Prospero. Nickie is the Royal Exchange’s resident RTYDS director (Regional Theatre Young Director Scheme) and this production is her directorial debut for the company. She is a strong advocate of accessible theatre and the performances feature integrated BSL and creative captioning throughout.

‘This is really exciting for me as a director,” she adds. “I’m excited to share with audiences how we use the deserted school to tell our story. Shakespeare meets Stranger Things meets the Royal Exchange Young Company”.

The Tempest at Abraham Moss School is at Abraham Moss School, Crumpsall from 15-18 August 2018. Tickets are £13 Adults, £11 Concessions and £5 for M8 postcode residents. Visit the Royal Exchange website for details.

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Fiona Whitelaw’s 2016 play Tinned Goods recently brought some of these stories to the fore, focusing on three generations of women in a mining community, and how the strike not only impacted on them financially and materially, but also on their friendships, families and relationships.

Relationships and the relevance of political decisions to every fabric of life are also at the centre of Maxine Peake’s new play, Queens of the Coal Age.

Set in Lancashire, it’s based on the true story of four women: Anne (Kate Anthony), Dot (Jane Hazlegrove), Lesley (Danielle Henry) and Elaine (Eve Robertson), who occupied Parkside Colliery in Newton-Le-Willows as a 5 day protest for Women Against Pit Closures.

It’s 1993, almost 10 years after the year-long strike of the 1980s. Since then the industry had seen pit closures year-on-year, and as we meet these four friends, Parkside Colliery is next on the list.

John Major is now Prime Minister, although he is never mentioned. Margaret Thatcher is still the enemy figure. As Lesley says, “She’s done for the name Margaret what Hitler did for little moustaches!”

Peake’s script is littered with barbed one-liners, which brings dark humour to an otherwise heavy subject and keeps pace in a largely static and claustrophobic play. For the most part the women are stuck in one dark space and we all know how it’s going to end.

We are told they are ‘ordinary’ women. Yet one is Anne Scargill, wife of Arthur Scargill, president of the National Union of Mineworkers.

Peake does well to humanise the face of what is sometimes seen as a caricatured battle between Scargill and Thatcher. But her characters also brush aside comments about his illegal strike as ignorance, when the National Union of Mineworkers failure to hold a national strike ballot was a dividing factor in mining communities and went against what many miners believed was fair and democratic. Having this raised by a manager, portrayed as a comedy character, tells the audience what the playwright thinks they should think. There are points when it feels close to a political soap box, but Peake resists this by bouncing the dialogue quickly between characters.

Director Bryony Shanahan makes sure we never forget the cause for which the women are fighting, with falling coal dust and ghostly groups of miners wandering through the darkness. We are also left in no doubt of the hardship these women experienced both underground and on the outside. As they stand united in the iron cage bringing them back to the surface, voices of the real protestors play over the speakers. “This policeman said to me, ‘You lost.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but we went down fighting. And that matters’.”

Queens of the Coal Age is at The Royal Exchange, Manchester from 28 June – 28 July before transferring to the New Vic theatre in Stoke-on-Trent.

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After ten or so plays together – including an intense Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, a shape-shifter in The Skriker and a gender-fluid, Hamlet – familiarity could make for a comfortable relationship. Yet, the pairing is a sure audience winner because their work never sits in a comfortable space.

Happy Days in this way is no different. Indeed, there can’t be many plays that present more restrictions for both actor and director of a theatre in the round.

Like all Beckett plays, it is not so much a story as a metaphorical contemplation on existence, with the focus on the fullness of the character, their actions and intonations more so than what it is they say. Here, influenced by the environmental emergency caused by plastic pollution, Frankcom expands the metaphor beyond the human condition, to present a stark picture of the planet’s suffocation.

We meet Winnie (Peake), waist-deep atop a grassy knoll that has seen better days – more mud than grass and most of what grass remains has been scorched by the sun.

Behind her, at the foot of her mound, Willie (David Crellin), her husband, has a hole of his own to crawl into. Although he can safely enter only one way, of which Winnie frequently reminds him, he is less restricted, relaxed and outstretched, half-dressed, reading a newspaper.

Winnie chats incessantly, with barely any recognition from Willie beyond the odd grunt or a raised finger. Yet despite her isolation and immobility, Winnie remains stoically chipper, repeatedly declaring, ‘This is going to be a happy day’.

She is the archetypal keeping-up appearances housewife, even sounding like a younger, Hyacinth Bucket (Bouquet). Her day is brought to an abrupt start by a fire-alarm shrill and blinding spotlights. Seemingly ignoring this daily assault on the senses, Winnie is beautifully dressed in a pink linen dress and matching hat, focusing on what she can, peering in her glass to make minute adjustments to how the spectacles sit on her face. Even reading the writing on her toothbrush and discovering a new word, brings a sense of joy.

As she takes items from her bag, some are discarded, without care, to fall among a pile of rotting rubbish. It’s all very mundane until we realise that sitting among her lipsticks and comb is a gun.

Designer, Naomi Dawson has created the knoll as a small island on a slow revolve, surrounded by discoloured water and washed-up plastics. Peake’s precision in both her movement and clipped speech, captures the audience and keeps them focused for the full two hours she is on stage. This is no small task, as during the second act her movement is restrained further with the character now buried up to her neck.

In this second act Peake’s face is projected on screens above her head. While this allows the audience to see her expressions at all times during the revolve, it is also a further restriction for her performance, requiring her to focus on the lens below for the whole act. Meanwhile, the gun sits beside her head – a constant threat, like climate change, largely ignored.

Peake deftly pulls the dark humour from her lines and paints clear pictures of those she sees with swift accent changes. We feel her Winnie still has energy and dynamism of spirit, even though the days stretch out ahead with the same routines.

Peake is much younger than Beckett envisioned Winnie. But, in many ways, this expands the metaphor to make her character relatable in a whole multitude of situations in which people are physically, mentally or emotionally trapped.

Like Winnie, when faced with a role that could so easily be stifling, Peake and Frankcom have once again excelled.

Happy Days is at The Royal Exchange, Manchester from 25 May to 23 June 2018.

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A new translation of Chekhov’s final play, The Cherry Orchard, by Rory Mullarkey promises to be truer to the play’s Russian roots than we may have seen before in this country.

Mullarkey is a Manchester boy and the youngest playwright to be staged in The Royal Exchange’s main house with his debut, Cannibals. However, he brings an authenticity to the production having studied Russian at Cambridge and for a time in St Petersburg.

Former RSC Artistic Director, Michael Boyd directs. He too studied Russian and trained as a director in Moscow. Given his experiences and declared love of Chekhov’s plays, it feels surprising and significant that this is the first time he’s directed one of the Russian master’s works.

What emerges, however, is not a portrait of a foreign land, but a re-telling of a story first performed thousands of miles away in 1904, with a range of characters not so different in their concerns from many people we know today. Some things never change, no matter how much we like to think they do.

This is the great strength of familiarity, and of this production. It is not the differences, but the similarities that strike us. Each character is well-drawn and complex. As they each relate to the onset of change in a unique way, we see a picture of humanity that reminds us how people, even those who grow up in close proximity, relate to events and their environment in completely different ways.

At the centre of all this emotion stands the magnificent cherry orchard, but even it cannot weather what is to come. In Boyd’s pared back production, a few petals of blossom fall to the floor, but we don’t see a single tree. Bar a slow central revolve, there is very little staging, throwing all the attention onto the characterisation and performances.

Kirsty Bushell brings a sympathetic edge to the self-indulgence of aristocrat, Ranyeyskaya. We first meet her kissing the floor of her former nursery and imagining she sees her late mother waving between the trees. At the same time, the distant sound of a running stream and the ghostly figure of a young boy, are a constant reminder that her memories here, however privileged, are not all rosy. Ranyeyskaya has returned to sell the grand estate, because her fortunes are dwindling. She had left for Paris six years earlier following the death of her husband and shortly after the death of her 7-year-old son, who drowned there.

Lopakhin, whose parents and grandparents were serfs on the land, views the orchard in a completely different way. Now a successful businessman, he too is haunted by memories, those of slavery. Jude Owusu does a fine job at emphasising Lopakhin’s energy and practicality, while allowing to surface a cold brutality and bitterness that sometimes fuels it.

Chekhov described his play as a comedy in four acts. For a 21^st century British audience, while there are moments of humour, it feels a sombre watch. Yet while we may browbeat over the state of the world and stand in trepidation over what is to come next, perhaps we can take solace in the play’s intellectual voice of reason, Trofimov. As he self-righteously declares, ‘I am above love’, the innate comedy of life surfaces. To take it too seriously can only bring ridicule.

The Cherry Orchard is at The Royal Exchange, Manchester from 19 April to 19 May 2018.

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Despite the constant feed of gloom in the press, great strides have and are being made elsewhere to improve the treatment and perception of mental illness. There is still much to be done, of course, and this debut from Kendall Feaver is another welcome step towards widening the debate.

In a previous role, I worked on national guidelines for mental health. On reading the symptoms for a severe mental illness one psychiatrist raised the concern that the list was so general it could be applied to almost anyone, sometimes. At that point, a man who was living with the condition said: ‘Yes, but most people don’t sometimes go looking for Prince Charles’ dog.’

This same insight, complexity and humour is captured in Almighty Sometimes, winner of a Judges Award in the Bruntwood Prize 2015. When we meet Anna (Norah Lopez Holden) she is 18-years-old and has been visiting a psychiatrist (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) for seven years. Although her diagnosis is never stated, we know she has a severe mental illness because she is being treated with a cocktail of drugs, including potent antipsychotics.

The transition from child to adult services is just one of many changes happening in her life. Anna is starting a relationship with Oliver (Mike Noble), considering her future post-school, striving for greater independence from her mum (Julie Hesmondhalgh), and wondering what it would be like to live without medication.

What follows could have easily become a drum-banging exercise either for or against antipsychotic medication. It is a credit to Feaver that she doesn’t come down on one side or reduce the characters to issues. Hers is a multi-layered script and, while it would spoil the impact to start peeling them back here, it loses nothing to say Feaver embraces the complexity and in doing so injects much needed humanity into the subject, allowing the audience to view the situation from a range of perspectives often shifting sympathies as they do so.

The characters feel alive and their relationships relatable. At times, lighting and sound are used to striking effect to reflect the imbalance of electrical impulses in Anna’s brain. Katy Rudd’s understated direction, keeps the focus on the emotion of the piece, making for a powerful, witty and heart-breaking production. There are outstanding performances all-round and Norah Lopez Holden, who won best newcomer at the MTAs last year, is proving once again she is an exciting young talent to watch.

The Almighty Sometimes is at The Royal Exchange, Manchester from 9-24 February 2018.

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So it is with its choice for this year, Sweet Charity, a musical whose innocent title belies a seedy world of lap dancing clubs, domestic violence and a heartless New York public who would sooner gawp at a drowning girl than give her a helping hand up.

Thankfully our heroine, Charity Hope Valentine, doesn’t see life this way. True to her name, her optimistic buoyancy doesn’t just keep her afloat; it does so with a smile on her face and a song.

As a musical it has good credentials – a Broadway hit turned into a successful film with Shirley MacLaine. The music, here with a live band sectioned in a sound-box to the side of the stalls, takes us from one memorable anthem to another, with huge numbers such as Big Spender, Rhythm of Life and If My Friends Could See Me Now.

Although first staged in 1966, both the music and Neil Simon’s comedic book have aged well. Quips such as: ‘Who dances? We defend ourselves to music,’ still raise the roof when dryly delivered by Holly Dale Spencer as Nickie and has the audience erupt into spontaneous applause.

Derek Bond’s vibrant production is one that bursts with life. He uses the Exchange’s intimate space to full effect, filling the stage so full with performers at times that they are almost on the audience’s laps. Aletta Collins’s choreography gives more than a nod to the razzle dazzle of Bob Fosse’s original dance moves. It’s glitzy and Broadway, yet at the same time is ballsy and full of humour.

It takes a strong lead to shine and hold the audience’s attention with so much going on. If ever there was a role that requires that elusive star quality it is Charity Hope Valentine, and here Kaisa Hammarlund proves she has it in bucket-loads. She’s sparky, cheeky and full of life. Never once is she out-shone, even as she stands lop-sided on one shoe, with mascara running down her cheeks.

This year’s production is brought to us by the same team behind the multi-MTA nominated Little Shop of Horrors (another unusual choice of Christmas show in 2014). Again James Perkins’s inventive design adds a wow-factor that lifts the whole energy of the show. As dance hall mirrors fall from the ceiling it feels like the roof of the Exchange has become the metaphorical magician’s hat.

In many ways it’s a triumph all round. But I’d liked to have seen a bit more fizz at the end, because after such vitality, the conclusion comes a tad abruptly and I was left feeling a little bruised rather than uplifted. It’s not that at Christmas time we always need a happy ending, but like in the film we do need to feel that our girl will live hopefully if not happily ever after.

Sweet Charity is at The Royal Exchange, Manchester from 3 December 2016 to 28 January 2017.

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Hattie Naylor’s stage adaptation, commissioned by the Royal Exchange, keeps the same basic structure of the book, by telling the stories of five intertwined lives using a narrative that unfolds in reverse chronological order. It sounds complicated, but for the audience this story-telling device is far easier to follow that might be assumed.

The action starts in post-war London, 1947, with the characters, dressed androgynously in over-sized grey suits, quietly circling each other. Although Kay (Jodie McNee) is one of the first characters we meet, she appears on the periphery of the story, wandering the streets unable to shift the melancholy of the scars the war has left her with.

In a series of overlapping scenes we meet the painfully insular, Duncan, whose friend Robert shows concern for both his welfare and that of his unmarried sister, Viv. Viv works in a dating agency with Helen, who shares a house with her friend, Julia, who unknown to Viv is also Helen’s lover.

In many ways these are ordinary, complicated lives and it is their humanity, secrets, desires and fears that drives the drama. The bomb-blasts, the sirens and the uncertainty of war only serve to heighten the emotions that are already there. And these emotions run high, culminating in two lust-fuelled scenes, which while not gratuitous, could be considered risqué for a theatre audience.

What works easily on the page or screen can seem intensely intrusive in the intimate space of a theatre, especially the in-the-round space of the Exchange. That these scenes work is huge credit to all involved; particularly Kelly Hotten, whose awkward body-language captures the nervousness of Helen, without making her overly neurotic, and Lucy Briggs-Owen, who sizzles with sexual confidence as Julia.

Georgina Lowe’s double revolve set serves as a metaphor for the movement of time, as the narrative rewinds to 1944 and then further still to the early bomb blasts of 1941. Dan Jones’ sound design, with air raid sirens, bomb blasts and Glenn Miller swing, leaves us in no doubt where we are in time. What drives our interest is not what happens to our characters, but what has happened to them to make them who they have now become.

It’s difficult to explain without spoiling the story, but the emotional intensity builds as Kay’s character begins to move to the centre of the story, and director Rebecca Gatward brings her literally to the centre of the stage, for what is the triumphant scene of the evening. From a character who displayed few likeable characteristics at the outset, Jodie McNee’s raw emotion can’t fail to move, in a moment that even within an almost bare stage evokes a real sense of London in the blitz.

In many ways, The Night Watch is not the World War II story we’re used to hearing. The characters themselves allude to it when Helen says to her lesbian lover, ‘I wish we could get married’. The liberation from war wasn’t a liberation for many women. Much has changed in the 70 years since the war, but the emotions that drive us are the same. And it remains true, that only by gradually getting to know someone’s past can we understand who they are now.

The Night Watch is at the Royal Exchange from 19 May to 18 June 2016.

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Here Hesmondhalgh is Vivian Bearing, a university professor who specialises in 17th century poetry. She is a brilliant mind and wit, although much of what she has always known is being taken away from her following a diagnosis of metastatic ovarian cancer. For the length of the play she is dressed in a hospital gown and salmon baseball cap. She has lost hair; she’s drawn, washed-out, and desperately trying to hold-on to some control of her situation. ‘I was a scholar when I had shoes,’ she says. We never see her in shoes and are left in no doubt from the opening how this play will end.

I’m aware that round-up sounds far more depressing than it is when staged, which is probably one reason why this Pulitzer Prize winning play is rarely performed. Another reason is clearly the strength required of the lead actor in every sense – professionally, emotionally, physically and mentally. Many who know Hesmondhalgh as Coronation Street’s Hayley Cropper will be surprised to see her playing an American intellectual. She is both convincing and moving – it is a triumph of a performance.

Vivian’s sharp intellect finds much humour in her situation, and there are plenty of genuine laugh-out-loud moments, even in the moment of diagnosis. I did wonder at one point if it was being played a little too much for laughs, because although I felt the uncomfortable tension of a hospital ward for those not used to it, I wasn’t sure I would feel any deeper emotions towards the character or the play. Suffice to say director Raz Shaw turns it on a sixpence at the end with a glimpse of humanity that can’t fail to move and I’m gone.

The attention to detail in the direction is sometimes difficult to watch because it is so well observed, and likely reflects Shaw’s own cancer journey as well as the strength of the script. In 1995, at the age of 28 he was diagnosed with Stage 4 Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. He has since been given the all clear.

At one point Vivian says: ‘If you think eight months of cancer treatment is tedious for the audience consider how it feels to play my part’. Throughout, Vivian does make us think – not simply about her illness, but about who she is and the passions of her life. You can’t watch her plight without reflecting on your own. It’s a play about death that makes you want to live, and the full house standing at the end were clearly both moved and energised.

Wit is at The Royal Exchange, Manchester from 21 January to 13 February 2016.

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