Out in the Northern Quarter …… the poster

I became a regular at the Royal Exchange Theatre some time around 1977, just a year or so after it opened with its futuristic looking structure.

Back then I got a season ticket and while there were sometime productions which I didn’t enjoy there were plenty more that were fun, electrifying and totally memorable.

Some were high theatre while others like Leaping Ginger and a heap of farces were the best anecdote to a bleak week in the middle of winter or a rainy June.

We tried to get tickets for the latest musical but left it too late, leaving me just to reflect on some of those earlier productions and wonderful afternoons in the bar.

Location; Tib Street, Manchester

Picture; the poster, 2023, and Vintage Royal Exchange, 2001, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

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