Mythic Reinvention at the Royal Exchange
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Mythic Reinvention
Always double check opening hours with the venue before making a special visit.
Mythic Reinvention places the Royal Exchange’s costume department where it rarely gets to be: in the spotlight. Marking the theatre’s 50th year, this free exhibition draws on an archive of more than 25,000 pieces, and stages them – part exhibition, part installation – inside the same Victorian Great Hall the productions played in.
Curated by the designer Leslie Travers with the theatre’s head of costume, Tracy Dunk, the show is built around the people who made the clothes, not just the actors who wore them – the press materials call it “an exclusive insight into the inner workings of the theatre’s costume department from the artists who created some of the Exchange’s most iconic shows.” Garments worn by Dame Helen Mirren, Andrew Garfield, Sir Tom Courtenay and Maxine Peake stand alongside decades of equally exacting but less celebrated work from the department itself.
Five decades of productions, told through what was stitched for them rather than what was said in them, is a genuinely different way into a theatre’s history. It’s free, needs no ticket, and runs for around an hour, in the Great Hall itself.
