Royal Exchange Theatre

This magic building, come spaceship, landed in the former Royal Exchange trading hall in the same year as Bowie ‘Fell to Earth’. Whilst it was designed by Levitt Bernstein, the director of the theatre company, Richard Negri, had a strong hand in the direction of the scheme. After spending just two seasons at Oldham Coliseum as a stage designer, in 1954 Negri designed the stage for a new group, the Piccolo Theatre Company. The budget solution used undertakers’ shroud material and the labour of the company to adapt Chorlton Reparatory Theatre to provide a more intimate space between actor and audience. When the Royal Exchange was secured as a space for a new theatre in 1971 Negri again set about making models of how he envisaged the intervention. A temporary theatre was erected in the hall in 1973 and showed how the foyer space, created around the standalone structure of scaffold, boards and canvas, could provide a setting beyond the budget of any new construction. The new exoskeletal steel craft was likened to a lunar landing module. Its seven-sided construction sat between the existing columns of the Royal Exchange. As a theatre in the round sat within an open space, the mechanics of the production are on show outside of the main structure. Actors walk from their dressing rooms across the former trading floor to enter the stage where no member of the audience is more than ten metres away from the centre. Levitt Bernstein made further adaptions to the building in the wake of the 1996 IRA bombing, which were completed in 1998.