Even These Things at the Royal Exchange

On a clear blue morning in June 1996, an IRA bomb tore through Manchester city centre, blasting debris half a mile into the sky and causing severe damage to nearby buildings, including the Royal Exchange. 30 years later, the theatre hosts the world premiere of Even These Things as part of its Homecoming anniversary programme. The play returns to that moment not in isolation but as part of a longer story – one that stretches back well before it, and one the city still carries forward.

Multi-award-winning playwright Rory Mullarkey structures the play across three distinct points in time. In 1846, Annie Donovan (played by award-winning Irish actress Elaine Cassidy) has a score to settle; in 1996, an ordinary Saturday morning inches towards disaster; and in 2026, Jenny (played by Katherine Pearce) returns to the city where she grew up. What emerges is a long-arc story about Manchester and Ireland, private and public histories, and the making and re-making of our city.

We start in the mid-19th century, when large numbers of Irish migrants were arriving in Manchester, many driven by famine and poverty. Their labour helped drive the city’s rapid growth, yet they were often met with hostility and ended up in brutal conditions in districts like Little Ireland – a place that became notorious in Victorian accounts of urban squalor.

From there, we jump forward to 15 June 1996, when an IRA lorry bomb detonated on Corporation Street, at the heart of a busy shopping district. More than 200 people were injured, buildings were destroyed, and large parts of the city centre were left unrecognisable. The Royal Exchange, just 50 metres from the blast, was forced to close for over two years while it underwent major repairs. What followed the bombing was not just recovery but transformation, as Manchester rebuilt itself physically, economically and emotionally.

Finally in 2026, Jenny’s move back to Manchester becomes a reckoning – not only with the city’s past, but with the way its past continues to shape the present. It’s here that the play’s longer timeline becomes more immediate, as Manchester’s history resurfaces through an individual contemporary life.

It’s those individual lives where the play’s intimacy lies, exploring private grief and love as much as public history. Mullarkey has long been drawn to the point where large forces intersect with the personal, and Even These Things seems to work in exactly that space – where civic history is pulled from abstraction and into everyday reality.

Like Mullarkey, director James Macdonald has a history with the Royal Exchange, and is known for bringing clarity to structurally complex work. Katherine Pearce also makes her return to the theatre, after starring in NO PAY? NO WAY! in 2023. She’s joined by award-winning film and television star Elaine Cassidy, plus a 108-strong cast of community performers from across Greater Manchester – a detail that shifts the piece away from being a play about the city and towards being a play by the city.

The Royal Exchange has often been at its best when it brings weighty, locally-felt issues down to the level of individual lives, and this is typified in Even These Things. It’s not just a play about the bomb, but about the longer histories around it – and the people who carry them.