The theme of the Royal Exchange’s 50th anniversary season is “a homecoming”. But whose home do they mean? Who lives here? Who belongs?
Is it, for example, the heavily pregnant Annie Donovan, an Irish immigrant who, in the Manchester of 1846, brushes shoulders with Friedrich Engels on her way to a fist fight? Incomer or not, she acts as though the place of the fight, St Michael’s Flags and Angel Meadow Park, is hers to inhabit. The 40,000 people buried beneath the flagstones of this former cemetery would presumably have felt the same.
