Manchester bombing, 20 years on: ‘Why did you do it?’

Louise Lowe rarely dries up in conversation. To some extent, her job as a director depends on it. Anu Productions, the company she established with visual artist Owen Boss, has brought site-specific theatre to new heights, both at home and internationally, by deftly balancing the politics of remembrance with some of the most electrifying and intimate moment of theatre of this century. Those works tend to begin with conversations, and chief among Lowe's gifts is the ease with which people can confide their recollections, their stories and secrets in her and her collaborators.

It was surprising, then, about three years ago, when her usual conversational rhythm of trust and respect came to a sudden halt, in the basement of an empty industrial space in Manchester. Lowe had remarked that her sense of Manchester, with its warren of brick, stone and steel, reminded her of Brooklyn. She was being shown the space, a possible performance venue, by a man named Trevor, a voluble Mancunian in his 50s who seemed to hold keys to every unoccupied building in the city. He told her that Manchester had stood in for Brooklyn during the shooting of Marvel’s Captain America. He recalled one scene in the movie, a spectacular explosion, and then fell silent. The pyrotechnics raised echoes of another detonation, this one devastatingly real, when the IRA bombed the city on June 15th, 1996.

After a pause, Trevor turned to her and said, “Why did you do it?” Lowe was stunned. “I’m sorry,” she said, reflexively, then wondered why she was apologising for an action she deplored. “Actually, I’m not sorry,” she said. The silence deepened. “I just can’t understand it,” Trevor said eventually, hurt. “Why would you bomb your own?”

The impact of the 1,500kg truck bomb* – which represented the largest detonation in Britain since the second World War – goes far beyond the site of detonation. Nobody was killed that day (the IRA issued an advance warning and the city’s response was alert with practice), but 221 people were injured, leaving Manchester’s centre severely damaged. Several buildings were demolished in its wake, and the city’s redevelopment eventually cost £1.2 billion. One visible consequence was an accelerated regeneration of central Manchester: the city proudly rebuilt and regrew. Another, more discreet consequence was the division it opened up within that city, a subtle rift of enmity and suspicion on which terrorism thrives.

When David Fry, who invited Anu to make Angel Meadow for Manchester's new arts centre Home in 2014, asked the company to consider making a work in response to the 20th anniversary of the bombing, Lowe was keen to address several aspects: the explosion, the recovery, and its long aftershocks in culture.

On Corporation Street, named after the site of the blast, is the second in Anu’s tryptych of works for the year, following Sunder (a wry and bracing look at the rebellion from street level), and which will conclude with These Rooms (a co-production with CoisCeim later at the Dublin Theatre Festival). It raises an uneasy connection during this year of commemorations: that paramilitary violence is one of the ugly afterbirths of the Irish nation.

With 14 performers – seven from Ireland and seven from Britain – Anu’s process has typically combined intensive research with intuitive response. “We are not the experts on the city,” Lowe concedes. “We’re very confident in our own history, and the rationale behind the work that we make at home. Here, the city itself is the expert. The people here are the ones that have informed the content and shaped it.”

Indeed, 200 Mancunians shared their recollections and stories of the event following an early invitation at Home; 100 more attended a town hall meeting, and Anu consulted several city architects and planners, military experts and locals, gathering details both concrete and anecdotal. Among them was the even-handed response of Sir Richard Leese, the Labour councillor who fielded thousands of hostile phone calls at the Irish Centre on the day of the explosion, and soon after initiated an Irish festival in the city in a bid for inclusivity; and the Irish nurse treating the wounded at Manchester Infirmary, and who had spent 20 years in the city, who was asked by a close colleague whether she might not consider "going home"; and the man who, at the age of 18, retreated to a basement stock room to sleep off his first ever hangover, and emerged some hours later to find tanks on the street and that his department store had disappeared (to use his emphatic phrase, "It was gone-gone").

Theatre makers often find an uncomfortable point of contact with terrorists when it comes to creating spectacles. The IRA’s renewed activities in 1996, beginning with the bombing of London’s Canary Wharf after a 17-month ceasefire, were referred to internally as the “spectacular bombing campaign”. In a moment of sardonic irony, Lowe had wanted to call Anu’s production “Spectacular”, before Home tactfully talked her down from it.

Unusually for Anu, the agreed title is more misleading: this new promenade piece plays out across the stages and facilities of the magnificent Home venue, and not on Corporation Street. This is an ideological compromise for an otherwise resolutely site-specific company, more accustomed to carving performance spaces out of less hospitable churches, street yards and army barracks.

“It’s probably one of the most difficult and challenging projects we have ever made,” Lowe told me, in a voice so calm she might have been pointing out the emergency exits of a plane.

But she knew that, 20 years to the day since the event, the bombing of Manchester is still a living issue. Last week, a police enquiry was reopened into the bombing, with the intention of identifying the culprits. (Anu's own enquiries have yielded assured insinuations and equally assured, if byzantine, conspiracy theories.) However it warps and mutates, though, terrorism is never far from our consciousness. When the Paris terror attacks took place last November, during the development period for On Corporation Street, they had a meeting to discuss whether it was ethical to make a work about a terrorist attack. (This week's events in Florida, which happened shortly after our interview, will have sent another shudder through the project.) Fry concluded this is exactly why they should be making it.

Lowe recalls several interviewees, dazed, perhaps, by the surprise terror attacks of the 21st century, who would speak of the 1996 event, from its bomb warnings through evacuation manoeuvres, as a vestige from the era of “polite terrorism”. If the show is about anything, though, it is that the trauma of terrorism doesn’t lie solely in fatalities and a city’s scars: it seeps into everyday distrust and divisions, sometimes for generations, and fears that are harder to defuse.

“Why did you do it?,” one person asks another. But that’s another conversation.

On Corporation Street runs until June 25 at Home, Manchester

*This article was amended to correct a numerical error