Blue Monday: The Library Theatre Company present Manchester Sound: The Massacre

Site-specific works have been serious theatrical business for the past two decades. Arguably, it all began around 1995, when the Forced Entertainment group drove theatre-goers on a surreal coach tour of Sheffield for Nights in this City, complete with a drunk guide and a grand finale in the city’s bus station. Location-based theatre seems more popular than ever: this summer, the Edinburgh International Festival hosts the Grid Iron company’s ‘site-responsive promenade’ Leaving Planet Earth, a three-and-a-half-hour performance during which audiences will travel to a new world. It’s so highly anticipated that it sold out as fast as a Radiohead gig.

Drama and performance have never limited themselves to purpose-built buildings, of course – whether pitching up on a rain-soaked village green or in a concrete multi-storey car park. But site-specific shows aim to go even further, ripping theatre out of the theatre – away from the bourgeois restrictions of red velvet curtains, pre-ordered interval drinks and comfortable flip-down seats. Those are for plays where the local vicar pops around for a cuppa, or anything written by Terence Rattigan. 'Site-specific' can also, however, simply be a reductive buzz-term applied to any live performance held in a non-traditional location, with audiences left shivering in dingy rooms and straining to peer past the tall bloke in front.

To Manchester’s Library Theatre Company, ‘site-specific’ doesn’t mean the latter. It means theatre that thrills; that engages with its surroundings, and grips you by the shoulders. Since leaving their home below the city’s Central Library – closed for refurbishment until 2014 – the company have staged two site-specific works. Two years ago, they produced an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times in Murrays’ Mills, Ancoats. Manchester Lines, a touchingly intimate work centred around a lost property office and staged on the fifth floor of Number One First Street, followed in the summer of 2012. Opening in a secret location on 8 June is Manchester Sound: The Massacre, the company’s third and final site-specific piece before they move in to their new home – called, well, HOME – in early 2014.

An exhilarating collision of two worlds, Manchester Sound: The Massacre is about two different groups of young Mancunians on two very different nights out – in the same location, but in two far apart eras. Half of the action takes place in 1819, on the eve of the chaotic Peterloo Massacre, while the other half occurs in murky underground clubs during the hedonistic summer of 1989.

Conceived by director Paul Jepson, writer Polly Wiseman and artistic director Chris Honer, Manchester Sound: The Massacre has taken 12 months of development. Wiseman, an alumnus of London’s Royal Court Theatre Young Writers Programme, researched the two eras meticulously – with the help of Sarah-Jane Haughey, tasked with conducting and collating interviews about the late 80s acid house scene, and Robert Poole, a research fellow at the University of Central Lancashire. Poole supplied eyewitness accounts detailing the confusion and horror of Peterloo, when, on Monday 16 August 1819, crowds protesting for parliamentary reform were charged by cavalry. Fifteen people were killed and an estimated 700 injured, hacked by sabres and shot by muskets. “Every major campaign for the rights of working people that followed looked back to Peterloo,” Poole explains via email. “It put Manchester on the map as the national centre for working-class movements, and it’s been there ever since – which is why the People’s History Museum is here.”

It’s a grey, drizzly afternoon in Manchester when The Skinny visits rehearsals at Hulme’s Z-arts centre to speak with Jepson. But while it’s miserable outside, inside it’s all costumes and bare feet, and that slightly panicked air of creative activity familiar to an approaching opening night. Rugby league player turned actor Adam Fogerty shares a photo of him trying on a silver wig. He has the look of a leonine Mickey Rourke. It’s a fitting comparison – Fogerty played boxer Gorgeous George in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch.

In the rehearsal studio, actor Leah Hackett is clambering over chairs and tables. With bouncing curls and sunshine-yellow pumps, she’s the antithesis of Tina Reilly, the bespectacled Hollyoaks McQueen sister she played for two years from 2006 to 2008. Today she’s rehearsing Lizzie, who persuades her boyfriend to join the exciting social upheaval at St Peter’s Field. As with the rest of the main cast, Hackett also doubles as a character in 1989. “Lizzie and Evie, my 1989 character, are both headstrong young women... well, headstrong teenage girls,” she explains on her way to lunch. “They live in completely different worlds but they’re struggling for the same thing: independence. They’re both exciting characters to play.”

Hackett is one of eight principal actors. Joining her are the aforementioned Fogerty (playing 1989 Steve and 1819 Nadin), Holby City graduate Pete Ashmore (Sam/Samuel), Doctor Who fan Stephen Fewell (DJ Liberty/Henry Hunt) and Royal Exchange Theatre regular Rachel Austin (Allegra/Jemima). Unsurprisingly for a play (half) set in acid house era Manchester, there’s also a strong musical strand running through the cast. Dean Anthony Fagan (Liam/Joliffe) is a funk DJ for Northern Quarter party spots such as Terrace and Black Dog Ballroom, while Northern Broadsides company regular Simeon Truby (Kevin/Tyas) doubles as the play’s musical director. Finally, Janey Lawson (Debbie/Mary) has past form with site-specific theatre: at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe she starred in The Assassination of Paris Hilton, a play set and performed in a nightclub toilet (“That’s obviously part of her skill set because she’s in a loo in one scene of this one as well,” jokes Jepson.)

The core ensemble will be joined by around 20 cast members from the local community, including many recruited from local youth theatres, whose commitment Jepson praises. “They’ve all been working really hard already,” he says. “And there’s such a huge tradition of young people getting involved with theatre in this city, especially with Manchester Youth Theatre back in the day.” They are supported by an impressive creative team, including movement director Lucy Hind of Leeds-based company Slung Low, and award-winning designer Amanda Stoodley, who has been working on the play’s immersive rave setting.

But this is a site-specific piece: so where exactly is the site? Nobody will say. It’s a secret. A big secret. Jepson refuses to reveal all – or anything. “The reason I’m doing that is I want people to have the same experience as I had when I went into the building for the first time,” he says. “It’s a rather splendid place. We want to allow people to take away a memory, to meet on a street corner and be taken off to an arranged party, which is how it kind of happened back in the day.” So is it in a disused building – an old office block for example? “I don’t want to say.” But is it within walking distance? “I suppose so... depending on what you consider walking distance to be.” OK, fine. All we can tell you is: the 120 audience members will meet at a designated place, then be escorted to the secret venue. The experience aims to recreate some of the disorienting excitement of attending an illegal rave. However, unlike an illegal rave, it hopefully won’t include rehydration with ice pops, involuntary gurning and a man leading a dog on a bit of string.

They may be separated by nearly two centuries, but both groups of mates are searching for freedom and self-expression. As Jepson explains: “It’s about how people articulate a desire for change and how they express the need for freedom, and what it means to be free using two quite different places. One of them is [done in] a very personal way, with fun and partying and all that sort of stuff, and one is something very concrete. It’s about how a society organises itself and both of them, I think, have something to say about how people affect the world around them now.”