Take Two: Manchester's Re:play Festival

Manchester has three fantastic commissioning theatres: Contact, The Royal Exchange and The Lowry. These bring the city everything from Catherine Bennett at Contact to Transmissions at The Lowry, with Macbeth at the Exchange in between. Throw in the Bolton Octagon and the Oldham Coliseum with places like the Palace Theatre and the Opera House, and you've got yourself a scene that is in relatively rude health.

Green shoots are showing through at the smaller scale too, with venues like Gullivers and the Great Northern Playhouse joining fringe mainstay The King's Arms to provide a decent range of venues to put on new plays. Given the loss of The Lass O'Gowrie and The Black Lion as theatre spaces a year ago, this is a really encouraging development. There are also a number of other projects in line – like the long-awaited redevelopment of the Granada Studios – that give cause for cautious optimism that the fringe isn't dead, it's just been trimmed a bit.

But what is somewhat lacking is a stepping stone between these two levels, something that allows new works to progress onto a bigger stage without the pressure of selling several hundred seats every night. That's where Re:play comes in. Gathering together the best bits of 2014, this year – the festival's ninth – has a kids' show (The Tongue Twister), a fragmented and fraught comedy (An Evening of Filth and Despair) and five other pieces, plus a collection of shorts, handpicked by the HOME panel to showcase the best of Manchester.

"What we did before was very DIY, this will be far more professional," says Alastair Michael from Ransack Theatre, whose production The Dumb Waiter originally played at Salford's King's Arms pub and has been selected for this year's festival. "It's important for us because there is a void between the fringe and the big theatres. This gives us something to aspire to and aim for, which is extremely important."

This, says festival producer Rebecca Jenner, is exactly what HOME are hoping to achieve. "[Re:play is] bridging the gap, but it is also much more than that. It builds a relationship with fringe artists, who are also our audience, and can act as a startup for taking a show on tour."

Formerly run under the banner of the Library Theatre Company, Re:play is now part of the HOME group, with this year's festival taking place in their interim digs at Number One First Street. "It's exciting to be bringing people into this space," says Jenner. "We've already used it for Best of BE Festival and a couple of other things, so we know what a great atmosphere it creates."

While not quite as site-specific as some of the rest of HOME's season, it is taking theatre into a space – an office – that would normally only experience dramas of the water-cooler kind. "It's minimal but beautiful," says Jenner, who adds that using a simple space, paired with the technical expertise HOME have to offer, is the perfect way to test whether a play can be adapted and taken on the road.

"We're having to re-approach the work and find out how we can recreate the feel and space we had before," says Piers Black-Hawkins from Ransack. "With the cellar in the King's Arms we had a certain atmosphere, so the challenge is to reproduce that."

The plays themselves are selected by HOME judges, including Jenner and artistic director Walter Meierjohann. "We try to cover as much as we can," says Jenner. "Companies submit requests for us to see their work, and we then score them on acting, directing and production values." A longlist then gets whittled down, before a final selection is made to put the festival together.

"We submitted because we wanted to get the exposure," says Michael, adding that the judges particularly admired the high production values of The Dumb Waiter. "This year we've been really lucky, because the shows are a broad range of types, so it was an easier decision," says Jenner, "but people still got pretty passionate about championing their favourites!"

Along with the plays there are two other strands that make this more than just a theatre festival. Comedian Justin Moorhouse is hosting a showcase of five Mancunian fringe comics that will add an extra dimension. But perhaps the most interesting thing happening this year is a reading of Two Spirits, writer Chris Hoyle's play that won the pitch prize at last year's festival.

"It tells the story of several Native Americans who came to Manchester in 1887 as part of a Buffalo Bill travelling show," says Hoyle. "Some of them stayed and became known as the Salford Sioux... there are people walking around Salford today who don't even realise they have Native American blood."

Off the back of winning the pitch prize, Hoyle obtained Arts Council funding to travel to South Dakota and research the tribe's history, an experience he has turned into a documentary that will accompany the script reading. "It's grown from a 50-word pitch to a cross-platform project," says Hoyle, who is currently re-drafting the play with the input of HOME dramaturge Petra Jane Tauscher (whose recent work includes Romeo and Juliet at the Victoria Baths). The nature of this work, spread over theatre, photography and film, makes it a good match for HOME, whose diverse portfolio of artistic interests is a defining characteristic. "Because HOME is new they don't quite know what they are yet, and I don't know quite what I am doing yet, so we work well together!" says Hoyle.

In the longer term Manchester needs to develop a middle ground, be that the continuing programming in the studio spaces at The Lowry, Contact and The Royal Exchange, or through new facilities at HOME and elsewhere. But for now, Re:play is doing a good job of giving small plays bigger exposure, a second lease of life and a chance for audiences to enjoy their favourite works once again – or catch something they missed first time round. While for Chris Hoyle and Ransack Theatre the scramble is on to get everything ready in time, for Jenner things are a touch more relaxed: "The hard part is over now that we've selected the shows," she says. "Now we just have to sell the tickets!"