{"id":3695,"date":"2014-06-14T19:40:35","date_gmt":"2014-06-14T18:40:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=3695"},"modified":"2016-02-05T19:27:36","modified_gmt":"2016-02-05T18:27:36","slug":"angel-meadow-performed-by-anu-productions-until-june-29","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=3695","title":{"rendered":"Angel Meadow<\/em>, performed by ANU Productions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Angel Meadow<\/i>, performed by ANU Productions, and directed by Louise Lowe, presented by HOME Manchester (Cutting Room Square, Manchester, 10-29 June 2014).<\/p>\n

Arriving at Cutting Room Square, a steward from Home<\/i> ticks off names and asks if anyone would like to leave bags or coats in a large red box for the duration of the show.\u00a0 Across the square a burly older man in shades is checking something on his phone. Two of the audience have not shown up. There are six of us waiting when another woman arrives to guide us to the play but then begins to \u2018sell\u2019 us the new developments of apartments which are, of course, actually cropping up in Ancoats. Is she for real? Is that guy on his phone part of the show? The effect of An\u00fa\u2019s new show, Angel Meadow<\/i>, is that the boundary between the show and the city in which it\u2019s set starts to break down: as we were led across Cutting Room Square towards the derelict building that once housed the Edinburgh Castle pub, the show feels like it is about to include all of Manchester in its cast.<\/p>\n

As we are led into the derelict block, the small audience is split up: what follows is a sort of house tour, as we occasionally glimpse one another in stairwells and around corners: upstairs a disturbed girl recounts her visions in a room of mirrors; Frank, the man of the house, sits us down in a taxidermist\u2019s dark cave of a room; a sort-of family meal takes place in a room of clocks that are \u2018not for sale\u2019; downstairs are\u00a0 boxer and a pig-headed man, a widow, football hooligans; in the basement is an Oldham Athletic fan on probation and staying out of trouble.\u00a0 How do the different scenes, or maybe encounters<\/i> is a better word, hang together?<\/p>\n

We are ordered around (asked to touch a stuffed animal and to open a sealed box, I won\u2019t be the only audience member made to feel \u00a0uncomfortable and anxious), asked to pass on messages or, more often, warned not to pass on what we\u2019ve just been told: to some extent we participate, and it initially feels as if we are contributing to the momentum of the piece, which isolates our social awkwardness, as if we have crashed a terrible party.\u00a0 But then a couple of the characters, the widow Angel (played by Laura Murray)and the \u2018prossie\u2019 \u2018Hannah Mae (played by Caitriona Ennis), do stitch together a narrative in which it is possible to embed the other impinging events, building up a picture of a brutal, inward-looking world.<\/p>\n

When the door shuts on the performance and we end up back on the street, Ancoats looks different, a stage set whose significance is sinister. But then Ancoats often looks like this anyway. The powerful, logistically brilliant, shuttling of an audience between scenes makes for a suggestive hour of immersive theatre. Some of its scenes will nag away at the memories of audience members for quite a while.<\/p>\n

But this work also feels a little underworked in the way it imagines emigrant life as nasty, short and brutish. \u00a0In a few of the choreographed scenes \u2013 a tabletop m\u00e9nage <\/b>\u00e0 trois, a pool-table encounter involving the devil and a bottle of bleach, and a hooligan face-off \u2013 the characters\u2019 bodies seem fully inhabited by a story over which they have no control: and characters like the prostitute and serial killer are perfect devices for such work, binding together their different relationships under the sign of sex and violent death. This is very particular, heavily stylised and consciously mythologizing: it\u2019s shocking and powerful and strange.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m not so sure that the story touches down as effectively on any of its historical or its contemporary settings: Engels and the recent boom make appearances, so too do the IRA bomb of 1996 and the football hooliganism of previous decades (though not how this Irish community would disperse in the suburbs, or crisscross the Irish Sea for generations afterwards).<\/p>\n

Louise Lowe traps her audience and her characters in a three-floored house, then presents a series of striking tableaux which clock one another and click into place in the culminating wake.\u00a0 The historical aspect of the work, though, feels skimpier and less credible and in finding analogies between different periods, the work becomes a little static, inviting questions about how much historical work a\u00a0company this talented ought or needs to do.<\/p>\n

John McAuliffe<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Arriving at Cutting Room Square, a steward from Home ticks off names and asks if anyone would like to leave bags or coats in a large red box for the duration of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[283,17],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nAngel Meadow, performed by ANU Productions - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=3695\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Angel Meadow, performed by ANU Productions - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Angel Meadow, performed by ANU Productions, and directed by Louise Lowe, presented by HOME Manchester (Cutting Room Square, Manchester, 10-29 June 2014). 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