Travelling North

Last week I travelled north to experience life at a couple of regional venues in the UK.

First stop was Liverpool where I was greeted by the delightful producer there who gave me a personal tour of both the Liverpool Playhouse and the Everyman. The Playhouse is a traditional proscenium venue with a shallow, intimate auditorium. The Everyman on the other side of the city was built in the 60s and has seen the beginnings of the likes of Pete Postlethwaite, Bill Nighy and Julie Walters. The Everyman will go dark for six months this year for a complete overhaul under the same architects who redid the Young Vic so it looks promising!

That afternoon I made my way to , I made my way to Manchester where I saw a production at the Manchester Royal Exchange theatre. 'You are kidding me' are the words I said out loud (yes, I really speak to myself like I'm an in a Tom Cruise movie circa 1980), as I walked up the stairs into the foyer. Seen from that initial low angle, it knocks your proverbial socks off. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure: the theatre looks like a flight simulator built in the middle of Queen Victoria's drawing room. Allow me to illustrate:

climb aboard

Once inside, the foyer - which at first you can still glimpse from your seat through the framework of the capsule - goes dark and becomes the backstage area where costume rails are wheeled in and quick-change cabins spring up. The action on stage happens in the round and there is literally nowhere for the actors to hide (nerdy factoid: the three tiers of seats are arranged so that no audience member is more than 10 metres from the stage). The effect is that you are literally in the heart of the action - more so than at any other theatre in the round because there is no sense of separation. In any other theatre when the actor disappears behind the wings they are slipping into a world that is unknown to the average audience member and so there is a distance created between actor and audience.

The next day I was given a tour of the venue (there is a second Studio space there and a whole busy hive of offices upstairs). Everyone I met was warm and generous with their time so I felt very welcome.

Since getting back to London I’ve seen an independent production of Kaspar by Peter Handke and WAR HORSE… but that’s another entry.

The production of Kaspar was held in a railway archway that had recently been fitted out as an office space. The company had installed a small seating bank and some stage lights but other than that the whole thing was acted out on the office carpet and felt very surreal but also cosier than you would expect an office space to feel somehow. Yet another top night of theatre experienced by just a handful of people. The theatre world is upside down sometimes.