Even These Things review – mapping Manchester’s history, from a Victorian fist fight to the IRA bomb

Royal Exchange, Manchester Rory Mullarkey’s play, expertly directed by James Macdonald, is a bold attempt to encapsulate a whole city in decisive events from across three centuries The theme of the Royal Exchange’s 50th anniversary season is “a homecoming”. But whose home do they mean? Who lives here? Who belongs? Is it, for example, the heavily pregnant Annie Donovan, an Irish immigrant who, in the Manchester of 1846, brushes shoulders with Friedrich Engels on her way to a fist fight? Incom...

By Mark Fisher