Bob and Val Aris had both been married before and were planning a low-key ceremony at the central register office in Manchester. It was Saturday 15 June, 1996. “We were supposed to get married at 10.30,” Val says, “but we arrived to find the city centre had been cordoned off. We asked some of the lads on the fire engines what was happening and they said, ‘Oh, it’s just a bomb scare’, and let us through.”
The ceremony was delayed because the registrar had been held up. “We’d just come out and begun to take a few snaps,” continues Val, “when there was this almighty blast. The next thing I knew, there was glass everywhere. My first thought was panic that one of us might have been killed. But as soon as I realised the family was all right, I thought, ‘That was some confetti we got there.’”
Sean Berry, who runs a poster shop near Piccadilly Gardens, also has vivid recollections of that day. “All morning, we’d been hearing the rumours and I thought, ‘Another bloody bomb scare – that’s going to ruin a day’s trade.’ I had no genuine belief that anything was going to happen – until the whole building shook. It was utter bedlam. People were so shocked they were running into walls, like wind-up toys that didn’t know where to go. What prevented us from worse injury is that our shop is in an old building. The original Victorian windows bulged and rattled in their frames. But any replacement modern glass just exploded.”
Mike Bishop, who was in Market Street close to the source of the blast, recalls a conversation with his barber. ‘The bomb went off and this white dust started coming down from the ceiling like snow. The man who cuts my hair said, ‘If you didn’t have dandruff when you came in here, you do now.’”
Bob, Val, Mike and Sean are among more than 200 people who have contributed their stories to On Corporation Street, a piece of documentary theatre commemorating the 20th anniversary of the IRA bombing of Manchester. Today they’ve gathered at Home theatre to relive that day and its aftermath. “I am a bit anxious, I have to admit,” Val says. “It’s that sense of apprehension, not knowing what’s going to come next. It reminds me a bit of the day itself.”
The promenade performance is the work of Dublin-based company ANU, which was behind the recent theatrical haunting of an abandoned pub in Ancoats. That show, Angel Meadow, focused on the conditions endured by 19th-century Irish immigrant workers in Manchester. This time the subject is more contentious – not just because the history is more recent, but because the city council has declined to make any official acknowledgement of the attack.
Louise Lowe, ANU’s artistic director, recognises the sensitivity of the commission. “I can understand why people might not wish to reflect on a terrorist act,” she says. “But it is part of the shared history of Manchester and Ireland. And I want to stress that this is not a theatrical re-enactment of the bombing. What we have tried to produce is an artistic response, based on the memories and experiences that people in the city came forward with.”
On Corporation Street wouldn’t be the first piece of immersive theatre to elicit feelings of panic and disorientation among the audience. But Lowe has decided to reject the shock tactics that site-specific theatre sometimes uses. “One of our rehearsal exercises was to walk around the building with glasses of water filled to the brim,” she says. “The intention was to slow everything right down – as many people who experienced the blast talked about the sense of events unfolding in slow motion. One of the staff in the restaurant commented that it wasn’t what they’d been expecting. He thought there’d be a lot of screaming and running around and explosions. But there’s none of that. No explosions, no running, no screaming.”
Although ANU has produced the show, the testimonies were recorded by the Manchester-based company Mighty Heart. “We walked around the city centre with a big placard that said: ‘Do you have a story about the 1996 bomb?’” says the company’s co-director Samantha Edwards. “We were completely overwhelmed. Everyone wanted to talk to us.”
Eventually, this mass of remembrance was sifted down to 100 testimonies that were read out in the Town Hall in May. “What really stood out for me was the way that information was – or rather wasn’t – disseminated 20 years ago,” Edwards says. “There were huge queues outside telephone boxes, as not everyone had a mobile phone. One guy said he had staggered back home and had to keep refreshing the Ceefax page to find out what was going on.”
On Corporation Street takes place not only in the auditorium but in the stairwells, corridors and even the backstage toilets of the theatre. The audience take various routes around the building and no one necessarily encounters the same sequence of events. Everybody sees the first image, however: a white lorry parked in the middle of the stage, indicators flashing. “I saw it,” Mike tells me. “I’d walked past it earlier that morning and had actually thought, ‘What a stupid place to leave a vehicle.’”
Next, we’re ushered out of the auditorium to explore the various scenarios. There’s a living room with a lad in an England shirt watching Euro 96. Someone runs past to say that Ella Fitzgerald has died. Then we find ourselves in the staff kitchen of the Royal Infirmary, where an exhausted nurse asks us to make a cup of tea. The fridge turns out to be a portal to another room full of distorted mannequins – although the bomb did not claim any lives, many recalled the macabre sight of shop-window dummies strewn across the road.
So what did those who were present make of the experience? “It had a stillness that I didn’t expect and a beauty that I certainly didn’t expect,” says Sean. “The room full of lost keys, swinging like wind chimes, was really emotive. It reminded me that I was a senior key-holder and had to safely evacuate my half of the building before I could even think about how I was feeling myself.”
Mike takes a different view: “I thought there might have been more shouting and anger. Because for 10 minutes after the bomb went off, I was just walking round the city in a daze and screaming my head off at the bastards who had done it.”
Val says: “I thought the ringing telephone box was a powerful image. I remember thinking that the only good thing about having a bomb on your wedding day was at least all our family were with us.” And how did her husband find it? “I thought it was excellent,” Bob says. “I’m a bit annoyed though because I left my umbrella in the kitchen scene when the nurse asked me to put the kettle on. Does this mean I’m going to have to buy another ticket to go back and get it?”
The most heated conversation, however, concerns an issue that has polarised Manchester for the past 20 years. Is it the case, as has sometimes been claimed, that the destruction helped to bring about the regeneration of the city centre? “It may have brought it forward by 10 or 15 years,” Bob says, “but the city was regenerating already. The Commonwealth Games did far more for Manchester than the IRA.”
Sean is more emphatic: “Was the bomb a good thing for Manchester? No, you cannot say that. And it infuriates me when people claim the IRA only intended to damage businesses and property. You do not place the biggest bomb in mainland Britain near one of the country’s busiest shopping centres without the potential for killing someone.”
“When I saw the white truck at the start of the show, I just felt so sad,” Val says. “Yes, the new Arndale centre is better but we didn’t need a bomb to do it. And terrorism is a fact of life now. What struck me was a line where a woman said she can no longer feel safe in busy places – especially when you think that the IRA used to give warnings. You don’t get terrorists like that any more.”
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On Corporation Street is at Home, Manchester, until 25 June
