After five years in the wilderness, is the Royal Exchange back on form?

There are duos that work – Ant & Dec, Wallace & Gromit – and then there are duos that work arguably a bit too well. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor! The fights, the passion, the divorces, the remarriages. Or, say, Dr Who and David Tennant – he’s so good as the character that no one seems able to replace him. Even now, a decade and a half later, he’s the bookies’ top bet to replace Ncuti Gatwa following rumours Gatwa is leaving the role.

Perhaps Manchester’s own answer to this might be the Sheffield-born artistic director Sarah Frankcom and the Royal Exchange Theatre. Frankcom was as accomplished an artistic director anyone could have hoped for in the eleven years she worked as a joint artistic director and sole artistic director at the city-centre theatre before leaving at the end of 2019. But was their connection too good? It’s a question that today’s review raises, given critic Matt Barton’s appraisal of the Caryl Churchill double bill currently running at the theatre.

A sensational treat for children this half term holiday

From our sponsor: Running out of half-term holiday ideas? You’re in luck: Operation Ouch! Brains, Bogies and You has just opened at the Science and Industry Museum (and will continue for the next year). The well-loved presenters of the hit BBC Children’s and Education TV series Operation Ouch! — Dr Chris, Dr Xand and Dr Ronx — will be your virtual guides in an epic romp through the senses.

With over 30 interactive activities, mini medics can explore their brilliant brains by banging on an eardrum, venturing into a massive eyeball and even taking a whiff of a ‘smell library’ during a playful and educational adventure at the museum. 

To find out more and book your visit, click here.

Is this a new era for the Royal Exchange?

It would be either a misjudgement or a masterstroke. Just when the Royal Exchange seemed stuck in a rut of safe, stubbornly middle-of-the-road programming, they announced a revival of not one but two plays by Britain’s most impish playwright, Caryl Churchill.

In a Village Voice piece from 2011, dramatists debated the question of who the greatest living playwright was. The name cited substantially more than any other — with six nominations to her closest competitors’ two — was Churchill. Because “she is innovative, relevant, poetic, theatrical, and massively committed to the form”; because “there’s no one else remotely like her and because of that, she’s invaluable” and “for her mastery of language, her ever-curious imagination, and her passion for real-world politics.” 

Born in London in 1938, Churchill began her career writing radio plays in the 60s — work she could comfortably accommodate alongside raising three young children. Her breakthrough as a writer for theatre came in the mid-70s, when she became the Royal Court Theatre’s first female writer in residence. To make the claim that Churchill’s work is about anything is to risk misunderstanding the whole business — her work is insistently postmodern, slippery and often surreal. But, painted with broad strokes, her work is preoccupied with socialism, feminism, power and challenging the way things are. It often insists collective acts of resistance are the only way forward, and is more sceptical towards individual efforts to better the world.

For the last few years, a better world has been long overdue for the Royal Exchange. Challenges have ranged from controversies (like layoffs during the pandemic, the cancellation of their 2022 summer show amidst talk of stress and low staff morale, and the cancellation of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream last summer, allegedly over “Gaza and trans rights references”) to the ticket sales a person might infer from the half-price ticket offers accompanying recent shows. 

Some portion of this decline could perhaps be connected to the departure of artistic director Sarah Frankcom in 2019, when she left to help run the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Frankcom enjoyed a uniquely rich relationship with the Royal Exchange, holding the artistic director role for 11 years (six of these years as co-artistic director). Over this time, it felt like Frankcom was at the height of her powers: she programmed lavish, supremely confident musicals like Gypsy and The Producers, as well as tender, lower-key plays like her swansong Light Falls which paired understated staging with emotional heft.

When one artistic director left, the Royal Exchange crowned two in her place. Bryony Shanahan had directed work at the Young Vic and Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre. She was joined by Roy Alexander Weise, who had trained as a director at London’s Royal Court and later became associate director at the Donmar Warehouse, a venue known for putting on some of the capital’s most innovative theatre. But despite their experience, in their four years as artistic directors, the pair seemed to struggle to find a compelling (or even consistent) creative direction for the theatre. They vacillated between overcooked adaptations like Wuthering Heights and esoteric curios like a revival of David Greig’s The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart — a play which sees an erotic, cloven-hoofed devil seducing a folklore scholar. Perhaps not the most intuitive choice for a Christmas show.

After Shanahan and Weise’s departure in 2023, the Royal Exchange ditched the artistic director model altogether and replaced it with a leadership trio comprising chief executive Stephen Freeman, development director Gina Fletcher and creative director Selina Cartmell. Sure enough, without concrete artistic vision, seasons have remained shapeless and unimaginative, epitomised by rounding out that year with a back-to-back hat trick of lacklustre adaptations: Great Expectations, Romeo and Juliet and Brief Encounter. Occasional brilliance – the potent and provocative Shed: Exploded View, a heart-stirringly wonderful A Taste of Honey – has been swamped by misfires like an overcranked production of the Dario Fo farce No Pay! No Way!

Which leads us to more optimistic fare. The news of the Royal Exchange’s double bill – coupling two oblique, unrelated plays, Churchill’s Escaped Alone from 2016 and What If If Only from 2021 – was unconventional, unexpected, daring, much like Churchill’s work itself. It felt like something we hadn’t seen in a while from the Exchange: a big swing. 

Not that the poster wants you to know it. Beside an abstract bouquet of flowers sit the words “Two short plays” in large letters so you can hear the pleading reassurance. It seems to sheepishly excuse itself before it’s even begun, inviting you to remark to your companion on the tram home: “Oh well, at least they were only short”.

And indeed the early signs aren’t promising. An initially unremarkable set sits mismatched chairs on a square slab of garden turf – the kind of showroom model you’d trundle past in a garden centre. But the Exchange are clearly aware of the play’s leading selling point. If you visit the website for the production, it opens on one name — but it’s not Churchill’s. “Director Sarah Frankcom returns to the Exchange with two short plays by Caryl Churchill,” trumpets the subheading. And indeed, while this doesn’t mark the first time Frankcom has returned to helm a play since her departure, it marks familiar ground for the director — in 2015, her revival of Churchill’s The Skriker won her admirers. Now, with this production, she has the audience right where she wants them: ready to be wrongfooted.

The first of the two short plays, Escaped Alone, is set in the garden of an older woman where she and two friends talk aimlessly about trivia like changes to the local shops. It hardly seems like the premise for an intense, eerie shot of drama. But then they’re joined by the woman’s neighbour. She’s played by Maureen Beattie who appears with an unkempt nest of hair and baggy cardigan, then perches and watches them curiously like a bird on a fence. Her strangeness builds, rupturing the naturalism of the play with direct-address interludes that imagine apocalyptic destruction raging through the otherwise benign garden scene, while surrounding clusters of lights pulsate like a menacing rash.

But it seems to agitate an unease and darkness within the other women too. A hard, stony, buttoned-up Annette Badland’s Vi bristles at the suggestion that she murdered her husband, but seems to confess in her own monologues to us. As she does so, her body slowly twists like a snake shedding its skin. Margot Leicester’s Sally, meanwhile, obsesses neurotically about all the locations a cat could hide in her house.

Their diverting, often absurd dialogue and performances are perfectly calibrated. The excellent quartet makes them distinct and familiar old women – Sally bemoans political correctness as your own grandmother might – while swerving caricature. Souad Faress’s Lena observes the group with the watchfulness of an old friend alert to each of their foibles and eccentricities.

There is the warm hum of their gentle chuckles and teasing. But the production’s soundscape also gives a real dimension to the idea of sinister disquiet lurking behind the mundane everyday. A faint whistle rises through their chatter like a boiling kettle. And Beattie bites on to the crackle of Churchill’s lines – “cities relocated to rooftops” – so plosives land like falling shrapnel. In her wildest eruption, she repeats “terrible rage” 25 times like a spluttering, malfunctioning animatronic, unable to compute her indignation at humanity’s ecological destruction. She, like the production, blazes.

After all the thunder and rumble of Escaped Alone, the space literally cracks open in What If If Only. The stage’s surface is pulled up so we can peer at its craggy underbelly, as if upturning a garden rock shielding insects. Danielle Henry slips out of the shadows and into the crater it leaves behind. And then we snap back into the ordinary once again. Except this time there isn’t the chatter and patter of conversation and company. There is just silence.

Henry plays Someone – even the name suggests her hollowness, lost in a gloomy limbo after the death of her partner. After rifling through old photos from a shoebox, Someone decides to talk to no one. She begins addressing an empty chair as if her partner still sits in it. You can almost detect her berating herself in her cynical drawl. Why on earth is she entertaining the fanciful idea of the supernatural and the afterlife? But she wishes for a “wisp” of her partner, and it’s granted.

Annette Badland materialises as a phantom from the future, with an M&S bag in tow (both shows’ wry touches leaven any earnestness). She now has a silky, melting lightness to her voice that contrasts with Henry’s weighty groans and alarm. Badland’s Future tries to coax Someone out of sorrow with a vision of a brilliant other world. And their movement seems to capture the grief-defined tension between hope and despair: Badland’s sprite floating and gliding around the perimeter; Henry as rooted to the floor as the sofa next to her.

The lights also transform – rather than viral cells, now a constellation of possibilities. They glow as Badland is gradually joined by more ‘futures’, embodied by the Royal Exchange’s Elders Company. They also share glimpses of their own alternate realities (one celebrates skylarks and coral) with Someone in a sequence so euphoric and poignant that you almost wish it wouldn’t end. But that wish isn’t granted. Nor is Someone’s desire to be reunited with her partner, confirmed by the arrival of Lamin Touray’s casually dressed, nonchalant Present (his is a Maccies bag). He urges her to move on, but Touray breaks the magic for us, too, his indifference overly flat, too aggressively stamping out all the haze that’s come before. Back she goes to those photos, then, but what a wisp of wonder that was.

You also wonder at the plays’ pairing. As much as they both concern fissures and fractures, together they present an atmospheric shift from violence to tenderness. It’s not the first time they’ve been performed concurrently, but this production – astonishing second-half set transformation aside – doesn’t reconcile their difference. Nevertheless, they could hardly be more brilliantly assured and beautifully staged individual pieces.

What strikes you, too, are the parallels between the plays and the Royal Exchange: the first being about a period of blight and hopelessness; the second trying to summon something lost from the past. But it’s a bittersweet parallel. It seems ironic that one of the Exchange’s greatest creative successes since Frankcom’s departure is a production directed by this same long-lost artistic director. All of which begs a question: does the Royal Exchange have a plan for life after Frankcom? 

One hopes that Frankcom, like that ghost in Churchill’s play, has spurred on the theatre into a new lease of life. It’s time for new leadership to learn from her successes: to build on the argument her productions make for just how spellbinding the Royal Exchange can be when it successfully ventures into more adventurous territory. Perhaps they might continue to pursue ambitious programming that’s matched by artistic confidence and which yields creatively compelling shows. Because for the first time in what feels like forever, the Royal Exchange sends you back out into the world, heart thudding with the possibility of what if, rather than lamenting if only. And all it took was two short plays.

To Dos

Saturday

🍷Bruk in Stockport are hosting an afternoon wine tasting event from 2-4pm. Tickets are £20.

⚡Head to The White Hotel for a brilliant line-up of two live sets and three DJs, including VHS Head from Blackpool, and Manchester’s very own Conor Thomas. Tickets are £17 if you get them quickly.

Sunday

🎭 Enio Acting Group are running free acting classes every Sunday at Terrace NQ. All ages and abilities are welcome.

🎻 And our friends over at the Peer Hat are putting on the latest of their Chamber series of immersive classical concerts. This one has Rob Wheatley on cello, and Elliot Gresty on clarinet.