Egan & Pinchbeck: Matchstalks Remastered at Lowry

Few songs are quite as instantly associated with Greater Manchester as Brian and Michael’s 1978 hit ‘Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs’. Written about the life and paintings of L. S. Lowry, it turned one of the region’s best-known artists into an unlikely pop culture phenomenon. Almost 50 years later, theatre-makers Egan & Pinchbeck are taking the song apart and putting it back together again.

Coming to Lowry this November, Matchstalks Remastered is a playful music-theatre performance inspired by the song, the artist and the city that connects them. Two performers, accompanied by live jazz musician Adam Fairhall and a record player, attempt to follow a constantly scrolling animated score that tells them what to do.

As the record plays, movement, storytelling and slapstick collide. Kevin Egan and Michael Pinchbeck shift between performers, songwriters, Lowry himself and the familiar figures populating his paintings, using the structure of the original song to create a series of theatrical scenes.

Along the way, the production follows Lowry’s footsteps around Manchester and plays with the way stories about artists are remembered and retold. How does a painting become a song? What happens when that song becomes theatre? And what gets lost, exaggerated or reinvented along the way?

The performance also arrives in the year marking the 50th anniversary of Lowry’s death, offering an appropriately unconventional way to revisit an artist whose industrial landscapes remain closely tied to the identity of Greater Manchester.

Part of Lowry’s Autumn Contemporary Season and presented with Word of Warning, Matchstalks Remastered looks set to be less straightforward tribute and more curious theatrical remix – taking something deeply familiar and asking us to look, and listen, again.