Even These Things at the Royal Exchange Theatre – review

Cities are steeped in history, and our collective history is all about how we express our individual stories. In Even These Things, playwright Rory Mullarkey excavates Manchester’s layered relationship with Ireland and inherited grief to craft an ambitious new work that spans centuries yet remains intensely human. Thirty years after the IRA bomb altered the city’s skyline and psyche, this Royal Exchange world première feels absolutely necessary as a celebration of Manchester and of its people.

Structured across 1846, 1996 and 2026, the play interweaves famine migration and everyday life in the Manchester slum that Engels described as “Hell upon Earth”, with ordinary lives poised unknowingly on the brink of catastrophe, and a contemporary return to a changed hometown. The architecture is complex, sometimes deliberately untidy, but Mullarkey’s writing is alive to the strange mechanics of memory and how history does not move neatly forwards, but loops, interrupts and echoes the same very human concerns.

Three stories are told in very different theatrical styles. At the centre of this sprawling tapestry is a magnificent performance from Elaine Cassidy. Making her Royal Exchange debut, she brings extraordinary emotional intelligence to Annie Donovan, inhabiting a woman hardened by circumstance yet porous with longing. The opening monologue, “Pig Annie”, sees a seven-month pregnant woman gearing up for a bare-knuckle fight to avenge the murder of her beloved pig. The writing, the performance and the direction come together to create the rare magic of theatrical alchemy where time stands still, and there is nothing but a bare stage and the storyteller to feast upon.

The second piece features a huge community cast and is a kaleidoscope of vignettes of everyday people going about their Saturday morning on the day of the Corporation Street bombing. Rich with humour and poignancy, the Manchester of 30 years ago comes alive on stage, and for any of us who were in the city that day, this is a vivid and truthful portrayal of a pivotal moment in our collective history.

The final segment sees Katherine Pearce struggling with the pain and confusion of a recent miscarriage as she meets an Irish, single mother (also Cassidy) in Angel Meadow, which is now an urban regenerated, stylish place to live. The piece captures the peculiar dislocation of returning home to find both yourself and your city rewritten, and Pearce anchors the play’s contemporary strand with warmth and quietly accumulating sadness and frustration as she navigates her grief. However, the writing feels weaker in this strand than in the previous two. The dialogue seems to struggle at times as though the writer feels more at home in the certainties of the past than in the vagaries of the present.

Director James Macdonald handles the shifting timelines and different stylistic devices with admirable fluency. The Royal Exchange’s in-the-round intimacy is an ideal vessel for a story about communal histories, and designer Laura Hopkins’ staging resists spectacle for its own sake, instead allowing people, movement and fragments of remembered place to do the emotional heavy lifting.

Ultimately, Even These Things is not really about the bomb or about the relationship between Manchester and Ireland. It is about aftermaths and the invisible inheritance of public events upon private lives. About the way history lingers in accents, absences and streets renamed by progress. Reflective, searching and deeply rooted in place, this is a bold and humane piece of theatre that trusts audiences to sit with complexity rather than tidy conclusions.