Reviews of Even These Things – charting Manchester’s history, from Victorian boxing to the IRA bombing | Theater

The theme of the Royal Exchange’s 50th anniversary season is “coming home”. But whose house does he mean? Who lives here? Who is it?

Is it, for example, the heavily pregnant Annie Donovan, an Irish immigrant who, in Manchester in 1846, washes shoulders with Friedrich Engels is he going to fight? Inherited or not, it stands as a battlefield, St Michael’s Flags and Angel Meadow Park, it’s for living. The 40,000 people buried under the tombstones of this cemetery would probably feel the same way.

Or you should, like the noise of the bar room, after defining a Manchester his parents so little that no one can say they are from here? Do you, like your parents, have to be born and raised here? Haven’t you ever left?

These are the questions in Rory Mullarkey’s play, a brave attempt to put something more than closure: the city, with all its shared myths and conflicting identities.

It is made from three seemingly unrelated images. In James Macdonald’s definitive production, it begins with Donovan’s voice, performed by Elaine Cassidy, lucid and gutsy, which brings to life the Manchester of the 19th century of poverty, lawlessness and Irish income earners.

Then the turn of Katherine Pearce as a good storyteller, describing the inner city life of an ordinary Saturday in June 1996. A well-made ensemble that plays fun vignettes reminiscent of the humor of Peter Handke. The Hour We Knew Nothing. The lives of teenage boys, supermarket shoppers and many Oasis fans have nothing in common until they suddenly act. An IRA bomb outside the Arndale Centre it becomes a shared experience. For all the wrong reasons, the renaissance of the city center began in Ireland.

Another bombshell is detonated by the finale, a romantic exchange between Cassidy and Pearce as strangers to an Irish cultural event in a park a few months later. Ariana Grande concert attack brought the city together. Their conversation about miscarriage and childbirth shows that no matter how difficult it is, the future is possible.

The connections are circular, the meaning of the play is difficult to understand, but when the events collide, what emerges is a thoughtful, rich and complex picture of home.