On the stage of the main auditorium is a lorry, hazard lights flashing. Near it stands a woman, a plastic bag in either hand. She is joined by others. Sounds, lights, movement give the moment of the blast emotional impact. People fall, then begin to rise.
Anu’s new co-production with Home is based around the IRA attack in Manchester on 15 June 1996, when a bomb-packed lorry exploded in the city centre on a busy Saturday. A warning had been given; no one was killed, but 200 were injured. Anu (last seen in Manchester in the award-winning Angel Meadow in 2014) specialises in exploring historical events; core members are the director, Louise Lowe, and the visual artist, Owen Boss.
The audience is divided into groups and led from the auditorium. We progress through a series of staged settings. In each of these an actor personates a character recalling or reliving an experience of that day. Whose words are we hearing: actual witness testimonies or reworkings or inventions? The programme does not say. We are in proximity to the characters. Some are clearly upset; they directly elicit our engagement. Is this intimacy or manipulation? Instead of the naturalist theatre’s fourth wall, here we have a confusion of invisible separations. Do we respond as audience to performer or as people to a person and, potentially, disrupt the clockwork mechanism of the through-flow of groups from one set to another? We try to guess what the company wants, speak when spoken to, and go where we are told.
