Vintage Royal Exchange …….

Now I never learn and continue to be very careless with dating and recording where I took pictures.

Digital photography has made it heaps easier, but when I wander through the back catalogue I can be stumped.

So, these I know are the Royal Exchange, and were taken with my first digital camera which cost an arm and a leg.

And that puts them at the start of this century soon after I swapped smelly chemical photography for the future.

But the exact year had eluded me, until I noticed the posters for a production of Hedda Gabler, and a search showed that the Royal Exchange performed the play in October 2001, courtesy of a review in the Guardian.

The play scored four out of five, and while I was tempted to quote from the review I shall just leave you to follow the link. *

Looking at those two images from 21 years ago I am struck by how little the Royal Exchange has changed, and indeed looked much the same when I first started going in the 1970s.

Sadly I don't have any images of the theatre from the 1970s.

Nor did I keep any of the programmes from what was a few years of exciting theatre from the classics to a memorable night watching Robert Lindsay in Leaping Ginger.

And that is pretty much it.

Location; Manchester

Pictures; Vintage Royal Exchange Theatre, 2001, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Hedda Gabler, Lyn Gardiner, October 31st, 2001, Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2001/oct/31/theatre.artsfeatures1