Manchester moves into the festival fast-lane…..

Manchester has just stolen a march on Edinburgh, in every sense, with the inaugural Manchester International Festival that ended yesterday. In a feature in The Observer yesterday, Ruardidh Nicoll wrote of the gauntlet that Manchester has now thrown down: “While the party hasn’t exactly spilled on to the streets, the thundering hooves are there.” It has beaten Edinburgh to it — not just for the fact that its taken place a month earlier than Edinburgh, but also – just when a new international festival director at Edinburgh, Jonathan Mills, is taking up the reigns there for the first time this year – Manchester’s Alex Poots has set out his stall with a daring and original policy to mainly do daring and original work.

It was the living embodiment of something that Edinburgh only latterly woke up to the possibilities of: as Brian McMaster told me last year in an interview for The Stage, as he came to the end of his 15-year tenure at Edinburgh, “”I came to the conclusion that the way forward for the International Festival in relation to the fringe was to do larger-scale work, basically, and to make more of our own work - it shouldn’t be things that could happen anywhere else.”

And that’s precisely what Poots has been doing in Manchester, with a risk-taking programme of work that was commissioned for and originating there, though a further life is hoped for some of the programme elsewhere. I was away when the Festival kicked off, so I missed the early festival sensation of the Damon Albarn-composed “circus opera” Monkey: Journey to the West, but while an Albarn musical has long been mooted for the National Theatre, that is yet to reach fruition so Manchester stole a march on Nick Hytner, too, who has been trumpeting the prospect of it for a couple of years now.

But on Saturday, on the penultimate day of the festival, I finally went up to Manchester to see two amazing shows that more than justified the train journey and the ticket prices (since I was going so late in the day, I took the unusual critical position of actually paying for my tickets – nothing I could say could possibility influence the box office at this point, so I thought it only fair to contribute to its coffers).

First off, I joined a tiny coachload of prospective “viewers” to see a semi-detached house that was up for sale near Old Trafford, being sold by someone called Jeffrey Parkin – better known, in another of his character manifestations, as Johnny Vegas. The show, called Interiors, was a fascinating – and comic as well as quietly desperate and moving – manifestation of promenade theatre in a (very) site-specific location. But given the space restrictions of the semi, it was necessarily limited to a small audience (capacity: 20), and even though two viewings a day were arranged, the total run across 12 days (plus 2 preview days) meant that it would have been seen by a total of not much more than 500 people across the entire run. The result is that it was a piece of “coterie” or “court” theatre – a wonderful one-off event for those lucky enough to get tickets, but actually a show you were more likely to hear about than actually see.

By contrast, the second show in my visit is a show that everyone should see: Neil Bartlett’s extraordinarily vivid, intense and harrowing version of Wladyslaw Szpilman’s war memoir, The Pianist (best known for the Polanski film version), was hauntingly staged in a tall, bare, wood-beamed room by director Neil Bartlett, accessed from beside the genuine disused railway sidings of Manchester’s Museum of Science and Industry, redolent of so many images of how the final journey began for so many people from the Warsaw Ghetto to the concentration camps. Szpilman, a concert pianist, escaped the fate of the rest of his family by hiding out in just such an attic for some three years; and the narration of his life story by actor Peter Guinness is thrillingly underscored by live performances of the Chopin music of Szpilman’s concert repertoire played by pianist Mikhail Rudy.

I would love to know what was the chicken and what the egg with this show: did Bartlett decide to do The Pianist here because he found the space, or did he want to do The Pianist and then looked for the perfect space? Either way, it’s the perfect venue for it; and I just hope that – if and when it comes to London, as it surely must – somewhere equally resonant can be found. (Mind you, it’s been nearly a year since the National Theatre of Scotland’s smash hit with Black Watch premiered at Edinburgh, and we’ve still not had it in London). Part play, part recital, this extraordinary piece about survival needs to survive to play another day and in another place: it is the best thing I have seen all year.