Instantly hooked on an amazing experience

Reporter: Paul Genty
Date published: 13 June 2014


ANGEL MEADOW, Ancoats, Manchester, to June 29

Ever had one of those shivery moments where some actor is encouraging you to get up and dance or something equally mortifying, you being a sensitive soul and all?

If so go nowhere near this most immersive of theatre/performance art installations, courtesy of Dublin site-specific specialists ANU and director Louise Lowe.

I’m honestly not sure what you would call it, but it’s brilliant — and heavily booked, despite playing 10 or more one-hour, overlapping performances a day.

Just eight audience members for each performance turn up behind the old Daily Express building in Ancoats.

The one-time Angel Meadow was once one of the roughest areas of Manchester, packed with turn of the 20th century warring Irish and Italian factions. The “show” recreates the fear and low-life standards of the feral times for the current day.

You walk a few yards to an old warehouse in the first flush of gentrification, your tiny group being shown round by a saleswoman.

Then everything kicks off. A murder victim’s young companion, blood on her face, bursts into the viewing. There’s danger, she says; run to the nearby pub where there is safety in numbers.

It’s like jumping out of a frying pan and into a volcano. There are borderline psychopaths, victims, a pig slaughterer; a boxer, a chap who seemed all right (as the two of us walked and chatted) until his mate said hello and told me he’s nuts, don’t trust him... There was a man flaunting his girlfriend in front of his wife, who was rather nice and offered me a cuppa as the two of us sat at her kitchen table.

The story is fragmented, like life; something about a dead child at one point, plus the murder, plus the tension of a coming war, plus suggestions of abuse. Respond to questions and you might get sent out on your own for another one-to-one slice of the story.

It’s unnerving, up-close and very, very personal theatre, in which one audience member and one cast member can play their own little scenes. It quickly becomes your world.

Your eight, finally gathered for the wake of the murdered man, hears more revelations from his blood-spattered companion but as the gang gathers, we are quickly seen back into the real world.

I mean, whew. It soaks into you, thanks to an amazing concept and an exemplary cast, like nothing else in a theatre ever can.