Making EVEN THESE THINGS: Set Design and the Stories Beneath Our Feet

Director James Macdonald highlights the influence of Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England on EVEN THESE THINGS. Engels’ work marks the human cost of the Industrial Revolution, mapping the impact of factory work on people, towns and cities. A large part of the book is reportage from Engels’ time in Manchester, and the slums around Angel Meadow. 

The first act of EVEN THESE THINGS is set in “Irish Town”, a common name for Angel Meadow that refers to the large population of Irish immigrants who lived there, in 1846 – the year after Engels’ book was published. 

Engels was sent to Manchester by his parents as a cotton merchant, and became a subscriber at the Royal Exchange, the site of much of Manchester’s cotton trade. His time in the city further shaped his radical thought. It was in Chetham’s Library that Marx and Engels studied and wrote notes for a text that would become The Communist Manifesto. 

In Manchester, Engels also met Mary Burns, a working-class Irish woman. While they never married, as they saw marriage as “bourgeois”, they lived together as a couple for 20 years. Little is known or written about Mary. Her voice has been lost in formal accounts of the history of the period and the birth of socialism. However, some historians argue that it was Mary who led Engels through the streets of the slums and the city that was her home. 

Engels described what he saw in Angel Meadow as “composed of single rows of houses and groups of streets which might be small villages, lying on bare clayey soil which does not produce even a blade of grass”. He went on to describe the houses as “in a disgraceful state because they are never repaired. They are filthy and beneath them are found to be damp, dirty cellar dwellings; the unpaved alleys lack any form of drainage… The lanes in this district are so filthy that it is only in very dry weather that one can reach it without sinking ankle deep at every step.” 

There is a strong case to be made that it was not only studying, but walking in the city, that gave rise to Marx and Engels’ socialist writings. It was witnessing and listening to the stories of people, their work and their homes, that helped shape socialism’s foundational texts. 

Feminist geographer Doreen Massey writes that place is composed of relationships across time and space. A city is built over decades. The natural landscape is slowly transformed into paved streets, shaped by the lives of its inhabitants. A city centre emerges around the places people gather, and around their labour. In 1800s Manchester, factories were built around the river. Around the factories, housing was built for the workers. Around the houses came churches, pubs and schools. New technologies bring new transformations: today, tower blocks made from glass rise in the city’s skyline, old mills become luxury flats, and a trading hall became a theatre. 

Built by hands and shaped by lives, the city in turn shapes us – directing where we go to see friends and family, where we study, where we play football or dance, and where we find places to share stories. 

Designer Laura Hopkins evokes the stories that shape our city by incorporating Manchester’s architecture and history into her design, helping the play travel from century to century across its three acts. 

Reflecting on the design process, Laura says: “As the Royal Exchange is in the round, the main element of the design is the floor.” Notice how the space of the theatre also shapes the build of the show. In-the-round staging means large set pieces can risk blocking the audience’s view of the stage, so designers must work creatively within these limitations to build a sense of the play’s world. 

In each act, the stage is reimagined through the theatre floor. 

Part One: a large sheet of dirty cloth covers the stage.
Part Two: a collage of different pavement slabs and gravestones is revealed.
Part Three: the stage is blanketed in AstroTurf. 

Reflecting on Laura’s design, Director James Macdonald says that “what’s central [to Manchester today] is the experience of the paved-over city, which isn’t the original Victorian city.” The bones of old slum houses and roads lie beneath our feet. The design evokes the changing landscape of the city, covering and uncovering the histories beneath us. 

For Part Two: So Many Mornings, the challenge was to create a set that would anchor the procession of short scenes within a sense of the city, while allowing the scenes to move across Manchester and follow all the place names written into the text. Laura says: “We wanted to have a generic urban landscape rooted in Manchester, referencing the different Manchester locations referenced in the text – including Market Street, the Arndale Centre and King Street.” 

“Originally, we’d talked about a textured floor. We wanted to do something that was really drawn from Manchester’s streets, so we were thinking of taking casts from some of the grave slabs [at St Michael’s] and pavement slabs [across the city] – recreating them by taking real moulds. However, in Part Two, we have all these things travelling across the space on wheels, so that ruled out texture. Then we hit on the idea of having photographic representation – so it will be a collage of real bits of ground in Manchester.” 

Photos of each three floors:  

1838: how the poor of Angel Meadow lived 

Unpaved for 40 years, it was finally laid with flagstones and thereafter known as “The Flags”. A resident of Rochdale Road described it as follows: 

“There was at one time a number of gravestones covering the remains of some dear lost ones, but these have been removed and a few are to be seen in some of the cottages… Very often are the bones of the dead exposed and carried away and a human skull has been kicked about for a football on the ground.” 

Friedrich Engels, socialist reformer and author of The Communist Manifesto, described Angel Meadow – an area he called the Old Town of Manchester – in his hugely influential book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. 

“Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description, I am forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health which characterise the construction of this single district, containing at least twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants. And such a district exists in the heart of the second city of England, the first manufacturing city of the world. 

If any one wishes to see in how little space a human being can move, how little air – and such air! – he can breathe, how little of civilisation he may share and yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither. True, this is the Old Town, and the people of Manchester emphasise the fact whenever any one mentions to them the frightful condition of this Hell upon Earth; but what does that prove? Everything which here arouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch.” 

Cottonopolis & The Royal Exchange 

Doreen Massey writes that “the local is global”. The cotton sheet that cloaks the stage in Part One reminds us of the international history of Manchester’s industrial past. The cotton trade that transformed Manchester’s industry and landscape relied on the labour of enslaved people across America. The oppression of Irish immigrants was produced by a powerful elite whose money was extracted from the bodies of African and Caribbean people removed from their lands and their freedom. The fabric of our city was made by people across the globe. 

The Royal Exchange building, originally a trading hall where many merchants dealt in cotton and cloth, offers a striking example of this connection between trade, oppression and place. 

To find out more about the history of the building and its connection to the transatlantic slave trade, reflected in the very land on which it is built, take a look at our Uncovering the History of the Building project – a research project in partnership with students from the University of Manchester. 

References 

Friedrich Engels – Manchester Histories
How Friedrich Engels’ Radical Lover Helped Him Father Socialism
Selections from The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) – Caitlin Duffy