A stirring history lesson provided by Jane Horrocks
Following last year’s If You Kiss me,
Kiss me, her enjoyably selfindulgent show revisiting the new-wave music of her adolescence, Jane Horrocks turns her multifarious talents to a grimmer subject – the industry that transformed Manchester into Cottonopolis and the economic crisis that engulfed it in the early 1860s during the blockades of the American Civil War.
In collaboration with her writer partner Nick Vivian and the techno band Wrangler, she has produced a stirring musical history lesson – a little worthy and slow-burning over its 70-minute duration, but meticulously staged, beautifully performed and salutary in its reminder of Manchester’s 19th-century industrial past.
Cotton Panic! begins with giant screens projecting astonishing statistics – that the city saw its population quadruple in 50 years and processed annually a billion pounds of raw cotton imported from the Southern plantations, stimulating high wages but appalling living conditions.
To sounds evoking the relentless clattering of the spinning machines, Horrocks materialises on the platform as an angelic wraith. Clad in a white gown made from the stuff that she celebrates, she recites doggerel agitprop, dances in clogs and sings wistful modal folk songs. Through it all, a pageant of the culture of cotton manufacture is woven. At one point Horrocks becomes a beggar, wandering through the audience in increasing desperation; at another she is a Bible-bashing philanthropist, saving souls rather than bodies. It’s a virtuoso performance, lacking only a climactic episode of emotional abandon and much in the way of a good tune.
A variety of counterpointing voices emerge through the screens, most notably that of another Lancashire lass Glenda Jackson, who reads with exemplary clarity and restraint a harrowing account of a destitute family starving to death in a hovel. The underlying message is one of solidarity with the oppressed: despite the terrible slump of 1861-2, Manchester remained staunch supporters of the Northern cause and Lincoln’s bid to end Confederate slavery. Isn’t this moving enough without the addition of the rather tendentious footage of Trump protests and Mediterranean migrants which brings the show to a disappointing conclusion?
Until 15 July. Tickets: 0843 208 1840; mif.co.uk