Misguided staging of dark historical period

Photo: Tristram Kenton

JANE HORROCKS in Cotton Panic!

COTTON PANIC!:

Manchester International Festival

(Upper Campfield Market, Manchester, to Saturday)



I HAVE tremendous respect for Jane Horrocks as an actress, and respect also for her fascination with the Lancashire Cotton Famine - that dark period in the county's life 150 years ago, when cotton from America ceased. Workers, including hundreds from her native Rawtenstall, were plunged into deep and deathly poverty.

But I have very little respect for this arty, indulgent bit of so-called "concert" theatre.

Cotton Panic! appears to be the result of someone reading "Cotton Famine for Dummies", drawing parallels with the slave trade and modern US-UK relations, then asking Gary Numan to give it an electropop backing track, and still others to exercise their slow-motion filming skills.

The result is wildly off the mark, crass and visually pretty uninteresting, with vast amounts of video time given over to the actress swaying in slow-motion in falling cotton dust.

It's performance art rather than theatre, and unlike previous actress-led attempts to thrill festival crowds - notably by Maxine Peake - this classless exercise by Horrocks, her partner Nick Vivian and the band Wrangler, is clearly born of good intentions, but also looks like Horrocks mainly wanting her rock-star moment. Or rather, her 70 minutes fronting a small band moment, with lots of sound and three huge video screens in a large hall.

And the "large hall" is a big part of the problem. Upper Campfield Market Hall, on Deansgate, is a wonderful old cast-iron and glass relic, and when you play loud music in it, you get reverberation. Lots of reverberation. So much, in fact, that Horrocks' shouts, folk songs and cries are about 95 per cent unintelligible.

But we can't blame the hall, though director Wils Wilson might have paid more attention to audibility.

When you throw in an unimaginative attempt to gee up the audience by launching yourself into the crowd while repeating "can you help me?" ad nauseam, or strutting without purpose back and forth across the stage, or using a megaphone, or waving a tattered US flag, or getting Glenda Jackson to make a cameo appearance on video - all with Horrocks' rock-chick head-banging much in evidence - the whole thing becomes tedious and self-indulgent.

So far removed from the subject, in fact, that the exercise falls into disrepute and pointlessness.

A terrible, terrible, misjudgment.