Did you know for example that ‘Scotland’ was in Manchester? That the area of Angel Meadow – tucked quietly away behind Shudehill – was the place where Irish immigrants settled in the city after fleeing the potato famine?  Or that on a Saturday night you could win a bounty if your dog killed the most rats in the ‘rat pit’ of the local tavern?

Such nuggets of information form the backdrop to Dean’s tours which tell the story of Manchester’s rise as the first industrial city and the particular role Irish immigrants played in it. He is not the first to retell the story of ‘Cottonopolis’ but what sets apart Dean’s casting of events off from others is the way he weaves personal stories – including his own family’s – into the rich tapestry of a well-known history.

Engels described Manchester during the industrial revolution as ‘hell on earth’, meticulously detailing the wretched living conditions of workers living in slums such as Angel Meadow. The name Angel Meadow derives from its once pleasant vista looking out over verdant fields, a grimly ironic twist given the industrial hellhole it later became.  Dean relates how swine herders in the city would drive their pigs up into north Manchester to forage before returning to the city at dusk, and how the well-to-do chose the area as a salubrious neighbourhood before it was engulfed by industry. The former large houses of the rich were quickly turned into dosshouses for the downtrodden by rapacious landlords cashing in on the need by large Irish immigrant families for housing of any kind.

Angel Meadow is now represented by the park and the area known as St Michael’s Flags. Gravestones can still be seen to this today of families and a startling reminder of the times is witnessed in the tender ages of the children – as many as 9 in some graves –  buried before their time by parents, such was the infant mortality rate. They were the lucky ones, Dean tells us, with the majority of people being buried in unmarked mass graves, corpses literally piled up on top of the other. Dean relates that the skeletons of such forgotten bodies  would often rise to the surface of the park and young children would play football with the skulls. Not sure what they used for goalposts…

Angel Meadow park was also the venue for often-fatal bare knuckle fights on Sunday morning, started the night before in one of the local hostelries and continued the day after. At one particular fight between two toughs (both one-armed for some reason), it was reported that one assailant ‘bit’ off the hand of the other. Different times, as they say.

Hunger and random violence sums up what life was like for residents of Angel Meadow. Dean recounts a story of one poor soul who died from burns after he was engulfed in flames, pursued as he was by a neighbour with a lamplight who set him alight following a drunken altercation with his sister. The guilty party received just five months for manslaughter, but was later sent to jail for five years for stealing lead pipes. As Dean reminds participants on the tour, the Victorians prized property above human life.

The tour ends with a reminder of the prominent role that the Co-op (Cooperative Wholesale Services or CWS as it was known) played during this and later eras. The area around Angel Meadow is stacked with former CWS buildings, such as the tobacco factory, many of which have been repurposed for flats and residential living. Also noteworthy are the various ‘ragged schools’ which adorn the neighbourhood for children of the poor.

Dean’s tour of Angel Meadow is full of rich detail about the city’s industrial heritage and he is a natural raconteur, warm and witty and an illuminating guide. His latest book about Manchester’s Victorian gangs, The Scuttlers (think the city’s answer to Peaky Blinders), will no doubt cement his reputation as a keen observer of municipal history.

And if you want to know why Scotland is in Manchester, you’ll just have to take the tour yourself.

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It’s an apt a metaphor for family dysfunction – for example, how many other children get to hide away in a casket for fun and perform numbers on it as if they were the Jackson 5? Weird surroundings result in weird behaviour.

Adapted from the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel and with superb live musical accompaniment, this is a very shrewd choice of show to stage.

Each family may be unhappy in its way own as Tolstoy says, but the Bechdels are uniquely unhappy. A father who flies into unexplained rages at his wife and children, a mother in denial about her daughter coming out as a lesbian, and a couple unwilling to admit a dark truth in small town Pennsylvania set the stage for a night of high emotion.

If all this sounds wearying, it’s not; the opposite in fact. It is in turns affecting, moving, tragic, funny and wise. To cope with family dynamics, little Alison (Harriet O’Shea) withdraws into television and drawing – her life story growing up is wittily witnessed in captions throughout the show, so that you can almost feel her walking off the pages of a graphic novel.

Her relationship with her father Bruce (brilliantly played by Nigel Harman) is alternately adoring and intensely frustrating. When she goes to college he sends her books, including by Colette. It is only her knowing college girlfriend Joan (Natasha Cottrial) who realises Bruce – himself hiding in plain sight as gay – is trying to tell her something about her sexuality. The adult Alison, played by Alice Audrey O’Hanlon with such winning insouciance that at times she resembles Dougal in Father Ted in her level of innocence about everyday affairs, only belatedly comes to understand her father’s psychological struggles, by which point it is too late.

The musical numbers in the show are sharp and powerful and brim along with zest, scooping up the audience in their enthusiasm. The fine ensemble acting adds to the show’s strong production and while there is a gnawing sense of claustrophobia in the unravelling of events, the dark never quite shades out the light.

Jodie McNee as Alison the graphic novelist is a continuous presence on stage, acting as both chorus and internal monologue for her younger selves, moving around the other actors with wonderment and pity in equal measure. Taking solace from family misfortune in drawing helps Alison process difficult truths in a way everyone will be able relate to.

The Royal Exchange may well have a smash summer hit on its hands.

Fun Home is at The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester from 3 July to 1 August 2026.

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He recreates the experience with brutal underscoring, inviting us to imagine incarceration and the daily privations which work to grind down the prisoner, particularly one who thinks art can challenge authority. His detention was a scolding reminder of the power of the state and a corrective to the fanciful Western ideal of artistic freedom.

Sewing a Button is both a literal and a figurative recreation of Ai Weiwei’s arbitrary arrest and imprisonment. We see the cramped conditions of his cell, bed hushed up against the wall, one easy chair, a desk a sop to the idea of being able to carry out work, a bathroom where he can only relieve himself watched out over by two doleful guards and where his toothbrush is manacled to the tap.

What we mainly see is Weiwei exercising (the mind as well as the body presumably) by traversing his cell floor back and forth, back and forth, flanked by Chinese soldiers, one either side, Weiwei in sliders and joggers, the soldiers in fatigues and army boots. The crushing power of the state lies in its ability to reduce life (and art) to a monotonous exercise where time is stripped of its function as a marker of activity. Occasionally the artist will hold up a hand, a signal that he requires a drink of water. This, though, he cannot get for himself – rather, it is brought to him by a soldier and his every gulp is fastidiously watched over before it is taken off him and he returns to pacing the cell.

Occasionally, glimpses of muffled conversation between Ai Weiwei and his guards can be heard, and he is not spared the ignominy of interrogation. It is in this section that Weiwei is allowed the space to define art, its historical and political function, his words noted down by functionaries of the state. Personal art, he says, can’t change history or push it forward, but it is capable of reflecting changes in society.

Watching such activity as a ‘spectator’ is simultaneously soporific and chilling, the boredom of the daily exercise and watchful guards a stark contrast to the power of the state machine to exercise control over a person. As we watch Weiwei recreate imprisonment in a 24-hour live performance, projected onto a screen above the stage are different viewpoints of the cell which the audience can imagine themselves in. Surveillance does not end with the guards but is aided and abetted by CCTV cameras.

Lots of artists have been imprisoned for their work, and lots have memorably detailed their experiences, but perhaps none more so in a way which displays the banality of state terror and how ultimately it points to a failure of power rather than its imposition.

Ai Weiwei: Sewing A Button is a 24 hour performance at Aviva Studios on 4 July 2026. You can watch a live broadcast online. This installation is a companion piece to Weiwei’s major new exhibition Button Up! in which the artist explores how historic systems of trade, empire and exploitation resonate in today’s humanitarian and political crises. The exhibition runs until 6 September 2026.

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In fact, the Foley Sound FX could really be viewed as extra members of the cast, called upon as they are to stand in for a variety of sonic deliveries during the show’s leap from scene to scene. 

The action takes place in a BBC radio in 1959, its cramped interior standing in for a murder mystery set in America’s rural heartland. Commentary of sorts comes from the studio gallery but otherwise Keirl and Babbage are left to follow the madcap plot with the sort of energy that could cut fuel bills instantly for the entire nation. 

Director Caroline Leslie has taken the bold step of seamlessly marrying sound and action so that the aural dimensions of the show are just as important as its visual ones. The move plays off handsomely and makes for memorable comic moments – and more than one audience intervention. 

Keirl has the most onerous task of the show in playing al 13 suspects for the murder of crime novelist Arthur Whitney, which includes his wife, a shrieking harridan channelling the spirit of Katherine Hepburn. Babbage takes the role of local cop Marcus Moscowicz who thinks this is the case which can make his name in the ranks of the police and impress his chief. Other characters include a German psychoanalyst modelling Freud’s persona, members of a boys’ choir, a French ballet dancer who pirouettes effortlessly round the stage, and a masters student whose dissertation is on – you’ve got it – unsolved murder mysteries. 

The musical numbers in the show zip along at a fantastic pace and Babbage and Kierl display amazing virtuosity in handling the piano and switchovers. The pace at which such numbers come along can make it has to keep up, but it’s all part of the fun of the show – it’s probably not meant to make sense, just to be thrillingly funny, which it succeeds in doing in spades. 

The show takes us back to the heydays of radio and studio sound effects and to corny Hollywood detective stories which make Columbo look like Dostoyevsky, and underpins the truism that with a little imagination and a lot of props a whole world can be created for an audience. 

Murder for Two is at Octagon Theatre, Bolton from 5 to 27 June 2026

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Rory Mullarkey explores what it means to be a Mancunian past and present in his panoramic survey of who we are, our roots and the 1996 IRA bomb which became the turning point for Manchester to reinvent itself.

The play opens in Angel Meadow on St Michael’s Flags in the 19^th century, with Irishwoman Annie Donovan swearing to revenge death on the person who killed her pig – also called Annie. Played by Elaine Cassidy with bulldozer energy, Annie strides across filth-ridden Angel Meadow and its salubrious characters without so much as a look-back. Everyone in the city is caught up in the grimy swirl of the industrial revolution, none more so than the Irish immigrant population filling up Manchester’s underclass.

Mullarkey then swiftly transposes us to 1996 and a sweltering hot day in June. Market Street is awash with the usual baggage of shoppers and characters flit on and off the stage, some in less than a few seconds. Some roller skate, some push prams, some stroll uncertainly after one too many. But they all make up the fabric of this indomitable city.

We are given vignettes of city centre life on that fateful Saturday: a husband and wife shop for clothes; a young boy undergoes a viola exam at Chethams; people queue to make phone calls from a BT box (remember them?); bored teenagers hang around looking moody.

This tableau of life is narrated by Jenny (Katherine Pearce) as the mood suddenly turns darker: a police cordon is put in place, Corporation Street is inaccessible, no one knows what’s going on as the heat only intensifies. Until, that is, an earth-shattering boom rings out and clouds of dust rain down on everyone. In one unforgettable moment a pregnant woman is lifted 10 feet in the air after taking the full force of the bomb blast. It is a moment of shock and silence in the theatre.

The production is funny and fast-paced. A runner down the centre of the stage ingeniously allows for dining tables and cars to be propelled across it, and at one stage a woman traverses the stage in nothing more than a swimsuit. A huge community cast adds to the authenticity of the production.

The play ends on a sombre note, with Cassidy and Pearce inhabiting two characters who chance upon in each other in Angel Meadow Park in the present day. Anti-Irish sentiment and the conversion of the city from the site of industrial warehouses to plush residential warehouse lettings gradually give way to a moving meditation on the tragedy of loss – and survival.

The production brilliantly captures the madcap spirit of Manchester and its refusal to kowtow to bombs, bigotry or bombast.

The world premiere of Even These Things is at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester from 15 May to 15 June 2026.

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The pair are stuck in a doom loop of waiting for you-know-who and wile away their time in petty bickering and philosophical musings. The scarred landscape (Beckett modelled it on Roussillon where he holed up during the Nazi occupation of France) is served in the production by the ragged placement of car seats acting as respite against the elements, the ground speckled with dirt. The lighting in particular deserves special mention for the soft hues it throws onto the stage, suggesting hope for when a new day eventually dawns.

Kelly and Costigan are a joy to watch, their dependency on each other as sad and wistful as it is necessary. The finish each other’s sentences, grimace and groan in unison, embrace and withdraw just as sharply, and take delight in each other’s misery. A true friendship then. Costigan gives us a Vladimir to remember, by turns hopeful and disdainful, his Salford accent providing a caustic edge to the character’s ruminations on life and death. Kelly is the more morose of the two, employing lugubrious facial expressions to convey the depths of his despair, the perfect foil to Costigan’s optimism.

But this is not just a two-hander: there are notable performances from Gbolohan Obisesan as slaver driver Pozzo and Michael Hodgson as the unlucky Lucky. Obisesan enters the stage with Lucky on a leash looking like a cross between a warlord and a rapper and delivers what can only be described as masterful portrayal of this enigmatic character. It is Hodgson, however, who deserves – and gets – most credit as the put-upon Lucky. He is bloodied from rope round his neck and infected with pus but retains a vital spark of humanity. When he is told by Pozzo to ‘think, pig’, Hodgson had the audience spellbound with his difficult monologue and was rewarded with a just round of applause.

The play is a treatise on the human condition and the monotony of life – ‘habit is a great deadener’, Valdimir reminds us – but what it shows most clearly is that out of boredom and waiting comes humour (it’s easy sometimes to forget how funny the play is), friendship, and entertaining diversions.  While waiting on the road we never quite know who may turn up, even if it’s not the person we’ve been waiting for all along. Having miserably failed to hang themselves, Kelly and Costigan stand motionless in indecision unsure whether to stay or go, an apt metaphor for the human condition.

A must-see show.

Waiting for Godot is at The Octagon Theatre, Bolton from 15 April to 2 May 2026.

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Noel Coward pours a lot into his dramatic soup and right from the start the ingredients are on display for a feast of drama: unrequited love, settling for second best in a relationship, choosing domesticity over passion, and just what is the correct attitude to adopt towards life. If the play feels dated, it can still be held up to the light through such universal themes.

With sharp direction by Blanche McIntyre and a set which continuously revolves – sometimes faster, sometimes slower – to give a distorting sense of time passing, the play reminds us that if we seek happiness in desire we will ultimately be disappointed. Jill Halfpenny (Waterloo Road, EastEnders) gives us an Amanda fatally attracted by past love Elyot and hoping that second time round they can recreate the passion which first brought them together, even at the cost of abandoning their respective partners. Halfpenny turns in a fiery performance as a woman determined to make her own choices, wrong or otherwise. When she launches herself at the beastly Elyot it is a moment of unalloyed drama.

But it is Steve John Shepherd – complete with bolt-on hairpiece – who steals the show with his louche portrayal of Elyot, all James Mason drawl and whispering cigarette smoke. He is maddening and is meant to be. His advice is to laugh at life and hope it doesn’t laugh back in your face – down with the moralists and up with irony because the alternative is too awful to contemplate. Elyot appears effete on the surface but Shepherd shows him to be full of bubbling molten lava inside, ready to explode at any minute. Quite a brilliant performance.

It all makes it very difficult for spurned spouses Shazia Nicholls as Sybil and Daniel Millar as Victor to make their mark. The final scene in which they confront Elyot and Amanda – and in turn vent their deflected spleen on each other – feels histrionic if necessary.  This is due more to the clockwork plotting of Coward than to any actorly deficiency. When Elyot labels Victor a ‘gasbag’ it’s hard to disagree, but Millar lends him the right amount of wounded decency we can all empathise with. Nicholls pits her youth and naivety against the others’ jaded immorality and in doing so reveals Sibyl to be not simply a victim of infidelity but someone who can see it for what it is, human weakness.

Some of the attitudes in the play are antediluvian and come with a warning but there is no denying the power of this production. The one liners come fast and furious and Shepherd is fantastic as Elyot at delivering non-sequiturs which leave you wondering about his state of mind. As Coward shows, to live with someone is to relinquish your private life.

Private Lives is at The Royal Exchange Theatre from 27 March to 2 May 2026.

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With feminism under attack as never before from the rise of the manosphere, a play which champions women’s economic freedom within marriage and their ability to make their own choices is admirable. Maugham here presents marriage as a transactional relationship where women stay silent on the subject of infidelity in exchange for ‘bed and board’ and economic reassurance. 

Constance Middleton (played with sophisticated elan by Kara Tointon) is the eponymous constant wife. She breezes on stage with the unruffled elegance of a superyacht, determined not to be blown off course by the domestic tribulations presented by philandering husband and Harley Street surgeon John. He has patients, she has patience. Her mother Sara Clover (a brilliant performance by the great Sara Crowe) dispenses ditsy advice to keep quiet and accept that men are born to be unfaithful (at least it’s with your best friend, she says, and not someone you don’t know); while Constance’s sister Martha – the paragon of the independent new woman – is all for tearing down the shibboleths of marriage and confronting the guilty parties. In the end, Constance decides forgiveness is a more powerful weapon than revenge. 

With music by Jamie Cullen and sharp direction from Tamara Harvey, this dialogue-heavy play is given a much-needed lift which keeps it bobbing along nicely. There are some delicious double entendres and the set – all tennis whites and art nouveau abstraction – underscores how the glitter of marriage may just be that once the shine has worn off. 

The drama, such as it is, effectively ends with the first act and much of the second act is spent explaining the first. But you can only get by on so many apothegms about the relative personality traits of men and women before wanting to set fire to the playbook. Constance is indeed constant (annoyingly so), not wanting to upend a cosy domestic set-up, but at what cost? She goes into business with her sister and finds she is able to support herself but chooses not to leave John, instead paying him a year’s rent for board and lodging at the family home. At this point, anything seems possible. 

There is some fine acting in the production. Tim Delap gives us a John terrified less of being caught out by his wife than being societally shamed by the thought of her going away on holiday with another man. Said man, Bernard Kersal (played with puppyish sincerity by Alex Mugnaioni) is the real love of her life but Constance is too much of a realist to fall for him. Jocasta King is perfect as the femme fatale, all swoon and swagger, while Amy Vicary-Smith plays Martha with strident urgency. 

The final word, however, must go to Philip Rham as Bentley the butler who – like all butlers, of course – knows everything about everyone and in the end is the only person you can rely upon for being straight down the line. 

The Constant Wife is at Lowry, Salford from 17-21 March 2026.

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This two-hander from Jim Cartwright (whose Road is currently paying to rave reviews at the Royal Exchange in Manchester) is the perfect vehicle for Starke and White, who play not only landlord and landlady of the Shakespeare pub (what else, this is Shakespeare North) but an assortment of downbeat characters who stray in and out of the establishment. It takes more than simple actorly versatility to switch from character to character in a heartbeat, one minute you’re dusting down the bar and the next playing a Scouse Romeo eyeing the room for potential dates in his trackie. There is an intimacy that clearly comes from these two actors having worked together for years which elevates the show and gives it added warmth.

Starke and White begin and end the play on their own, starting out a bickering couple who can’t stand the sight of each other to a final, emotional reckoning in which they reveal it was once more than just the two of them. Theirs is an old-style pub whose time has come and gone but which serves to remind us that such places acted as repositories of human nature, for better or worse. There are plenty of laugh-out loud moments in the play, most notably when Starke appears in his ‘Scouse tuxedo’ and 80s mullet to woo the women in the audience with his wily ways, all the while being carefully watched over by his gullible girlfriend. But this is a play with serious intent and director Lisa Allen elicits a remarkable performance from Starke and White as a couple in an abusive relationship, which is very hard to watch. Starkie, throughout the night more often than not playing affable characters, delivers the role with unexpected menace.

Cartwright stuffs a lot into his little play: abandoned children, mental health patients lost in the community, lonely widowers living off memories and mild, a wife caring for her dementia-struck husband. His talent, and more particularly that of Starke and White, is in bringing them alive with such compassion and wit.

Two is at Shakespeare North Playhouse from 10 to 28 March 2026.

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Today we might say he was neurodivergent and that he simply saw the world in righteous black and white terms, refusing to make allowances for the everyday compromises in life we all have to make.

The joy of this production is that it gives us Turing the whole man, scientist, lover, son, friend and, yes, the man who hastened the end of the war and who was entrusted with the highest secrets by the government. A government who prized his mind but could not countenance his private behaviour.

Mark Edel-Hunt gives a brilliant performance as Turing, someone who stammers only when talking about the prosaic things of everyday life: when he expounds on the possibilities of science and his quest to invent ‘a machine that thinks’, the stutter fades away. He delivers a Turing who is funny, complex, maddening and entirely at ease with his own sexuality even if others are not.

The play takes in the arc of Turing’s life from idyllic English countryside childhood and boarding school, to the University of Manchester and his scientific work on cyphers and computers, to his disgrace (to others) and ultimate downfall.  There are many laugh-out-loud moments and what comes across strongly is Turing’s zest for life, or more properly, his zest to understand how life is put together and whether a mind can exist outside a body, i.e. in a machine.

Edel-Hunt, while undoubtedly the star of the show, is aided and abetted by a fantastic ensemble cast, including Susie Trayling as his admiring yet mystified mother, Pete Hamilton Dyer who as Bletchley Park head Dilwyn Knox comes across as an amalgam of Rigsby and an eccentric Oxford don, and Niall Costigan as straightlaced police detective Mick Ross who played such a large part in Turing’s prosecution. Special praise must be singled out for Joe Usher as Turing’s young lover whom he met in a pub near Manchester’s Oxford Road station and who would arrange a burglary of the scientist’s home, the unravelling of which would determine the scientist’s fate. Usher plays the young chancer Ron Miller with bounding insouciance.

This is a formidable play acted and directed with wit and warmth and shines a much-needed light on what we like to think are darker times. Let’s hope they never return.

Breaking the Code is at Home, Manchester from 28 October to 1 November 2025.

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