Cotton, Slavery And Poetry: Theatre Turns Spotlight On Its Challenging Past

A Manchester theatre is facing up to its history at the heart of the 19th Century cotton industry, which depended on slavery in America.

A colossal clash of styles greets visitors who step inside the Royal Exchange.

You see the giant pink Victorian marble pillars and the domed glass roof of the opulent grand hall.

But you can’t fail to notice the industrial 1970s metal frame and brightly coloured staircases of the theatre module, which looks like a spaceship that’s landed in the middle of the floor.

Amid that visual onslaught, it’s easy to overlook some slightly dilapidated wooden boards high on one wall.

They bear names – Liverpool, New York, Alexandria, Paris, Sudan – and some numbers.

It still may not be immediately clear that they are the only obvious remnants from the building’s original purpose.

They show the final prices from when the Royal Exchange was the main trading floor in the cotton capital of the world.

Five thousand merchants gathered in the building in the mid-19th Century to strike deals to export the cloth that had been manufactured in the city’s mills. It was rebuilt as business boomed, with much of the current building dating from 1874.

Manchester was known as Cottonopolis, and the Royal Exchange was the “parliament of the cotton lords”.

Activity peaked in the 1920s when the Royal Exchange had 11,000 members. But trading stopped in 1968 – the date 31 Dec on the boards was its final day.

The hall was transformed into a theatre when the seven-sided spaceship was installed eight years later.

The building’s history and the rest of Manchester’s industrial past have generally been sources of pride and celebration.

But when Roy Alexander Weise was appointed joint artistic director with Bryony Shanahan in 2019, becoming the first person of colour to hold that position, he suddenly had second thoughts.

“Some people reflected back to me that as a black person, they just would never walk into here,” he says, sitting beneath the trading boards in the echoing hall.

“It’s been a place that has, like, sold their ancestors, and people feel a really visceral… they really repel from the idea of coming here because of what it has stood for in the past.”

The traders in fact sold consignments of cotton goods, but until slavery was abolished in America in 1865 those goods were usually made with cotton picked by the hands of enslaved people in the southern states.

Although many people in Manchester opposed it, the system of slavery – the mass enforced labour, subjugation and torture of people taken from Africa and the descendants of those people – was partly fuelled by the global cotton trade.

The Royal Exchange (along with another market in Liverpool for raw cotton) was the epicentre of that trade.

And the prices had a direct effect on the other side of the Atlantic. A freed slave named John Brown wrote: “When the price rises in the English market, even but half a farthing a pound, the poor slaves immediately feel the effects, for they are harder driven, and the whip is kept more constantly going.”

Weise says: “I think I’ve always known the history of this building, but not in a great amount of detail.”

He accepted the job running the theatre that now occupies the trading hall despite his fears of becoming “a sell-out”, deciding it was better to try to change its purpose and status from the inside.

Because of the pandemic, his first show there as director – Katori Hall’s Olivier Award-winning The Mountaintop, about Martin Luther King’s last night before his assassination – only opened last month.

Now he and Shanahan are confronting the building’s past head-on, and trying to make it welcoming for people who may not previously have stepped inside, with a long-term series of works.