HOME announces site-specific theatre programme

HOME, Manchester’s new purpose-built centre for international contemporary art, theatre, film and books, doesn’t open its doors until spring 2015, but that didn’t stop it launching its inaugural theatre programme yesterday. A series of site-specific works have been curated by Walter Meierjohann, HOME’s artistic director of theatre, and will pave the way for the kind of theatre that will be seen at HOME when it opens proper next year.

“In that strong Mancunian tradition, HOME is an organisation that is of this city, and proud of it too,” says Dave Moutrey, HOME’s chief executive, at the programme launch. “But HOME is also of the Northwest, of the UK, of Europe – distinctly international and connected to the community and world we live in.” This blend of international and community is keenly felt in Meierjohann’s programme, which Moutrey calls “the standard bearer, the trailblazer, the vanguard for everything that will be HOME.”

The season begins with Angel Meadow (10-29 Jun), which brings to life a community in Manchester that no longer exists. “We walked a lot of places,” says Louise Lowe, the artistic director of Dublin’s ANU Production, the company invited to open the programme. Her first job was to find a location for the production: “I saw extraordinary buildings and different kinds of sites,” Lowe explains at the launch, “and then we wandered into Ancoats and everything changed for us.” The show will look at the history and culture of the Irish immigrants who moved there after the Irish famine into the Victorian slums that occupied Ancoats. Angel Meadow will bring this world of “red-eyed scuttling gangs and girl rippers” into a contemporary context. “We’re curious about putting together an interactive journey for people,” Lowe says. “This is not going to be a play where you sit down, watch and eat chocolates.”

In the autumn, Meierjohann will direct his own piece, a production of a classic text about tumultuous communities: Romeo and Juliet (10 Sep-4 Oct). His setting is one of Manchester’s great spaces: its Victorian Baths. The Grade II building will be transformed by designer Ti Green, responsible for the recent much-praised production of Orlando at the Royal Exchange, and music comes from Macedonian composer Nikola Kodjbashaia, who Meierjohann has worked with twice before. HOME’s artistic director of theatre insists this won’t be a simple renaissance-style retelling of the Bard, but more of a contemporary fairytale. “I want to link it to an Eastern European underworld, Mafia style,” Meierjohann says intriguingly.

Following these two productions, Meierjohann and his team will move HOME’s theatre activities to Number One First Street, the office space that overlooks the under-construction HOME building. It’s here in October that the BE (Birmingham European) Festival will perform three highlights of the 2014 edition, which takes place in July. The most novel part of the Best of BE (17-18 Oct) is that it incorporates its trio of plays with a dinner during one of the intervals, where the audience and the performers eat together. “We’re very excited about reproducing that community spirit in HOME,” says Miguel Oyarzun, BE Festival’s co-director.

The Best of BE will be followed by acclaimed production The Events (22-25 Oct), from The Actors Touring Company, which was voted the best play of 2013 by critics at the Guardian. The play’s starting point was the Anders Breivik killings in Norway, and explores how something so awful can come out of what looks to be, to outsiders at least, a perfect society. Lyn Gardner called it ‘a mighty play about not just one lost soul, but many.’ And in the new year, re:play Festival continues the Libraray Theatre’s tradition of bringing the city’s fringe theatre to a wider audience.

“The season is a taster of things to come,” says Meierjohann. Our mouths are watering.