Rory Mullarkey's play, expertly directed by James Macdonald at the Royal Exchange, is a bold attempt to encapsulate a whole city in decisive events from across three centuries. The theme of the Royal Exchange's 50th anniversary season is 'a homecoming', but the play questions whose home that means and who belongs.
The play opens with Elaine Cassidy as Annie Donovan, a heavily pregnant Irish immigrant in 1846 Manchester, who brushes shoulders with Friedrich Engels on her way to a fist fight at St Michael's Flags and Angel Meadow Park. The 40,000 people buried beneath the flagstones of the former cemetery would presumably have felt the same sense of belonging.
A switch to Katherine Pearce as a cool-headed narrator describes a Saturday in June 1996, with a community cast playing out whimsical vignettes of teenage goths, supermarket shoppers and Oasis fans. Their lives have nothing in common until an IRA bomb outside the Arndale Centre becomes their shared experience, with the city's subsequent regeneration rooted in Ireland.
The final scene features a tender exchange between Cassidy and Pearce as strangers of Irish heritage meeting in a park months after the attack on an Ariana Grande concert. Their chat about miscarriage and childbirth suggests a difficult but possible future. The connections are elliptical, but the play offers a thoughtful, rich and complex picture of home.
