A piece of so-called ‘promenade theatre’ in Manchester’s Ancoats district sees small groups of audience members taken through a series of settings, including a scene featuring a pub pool table.
Angel Meadow opened on June 10th and runs until June 29th, an ANU Productions feature attached to Manchester’s HOME arts project.
It challenges the audience to not just look back to some of the city’s darker past, but to actually engage in it, interacting with the characters as part of an immersive performance.
The general setting for this performance is an old pub – a typical city ‘boozer’ of generations past – which is populated with the characters you might expect to find within.
Audience members are invited to interact at various points throughout the performance, and at times this is a deliberately discomfiting invitation.
This means visitors might find themselves leaning over a pub pool table to play a shot, with the character of an abusive husband as their opponent.
It is a deliberately thought-provoking show, which does not dwell on the past, but rather acts as a reminder of how much more civilised the city has become, and is an undeniably artistic use for a pub pool table.