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By James Hadley in London

I'd heard of Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre as the city's preeminent venue for professional theatre, and in particular for new writing. What I hadn't been told was that the theatre space itself is worth a visit.

The theatre auditorium is built for theatre-in-the-round, and is a building inside a building - it looks almost like a spaceship inside the huge, grand hall that was once the Victorian Cotton Exchange. The ingenious design places this seven-sided glass capsule within what's apparently one of the largest rooms in the country, its weight braced against the walls of the building, because otherwise it would go through the floor.

Aside from the novelty of the construction, it places all three tiers of audience in surprisingly close proximity to the stage. The resulting viewing dynamic is similar to that at the Globe Theatre, and it instantly became one of my favourite theatre venues.
 
I was there to watch 'Everybody Loves A Winner', a new play by Neil Bartlett, Simon Deacon and Struan Leslie, commissioned by the Manchester International Festival. The gimmick is that it's a show about bingo which includes the audience in playing the game, but it's far more than a one idea production. This is a crowd-pleaser of a show, with humour, singing, dancing, tight scriptwriting and a big heart - all alongside its novel participative elements. It's one of those rare pieces that has 'hit' written all over it - like 'Mama Mia', it's a guaranteed good night out, to the extent that you could imagine hen nights attending it.
 
We're introduced, in direct address, to the various staff of the bingo hall that's been recreated in detail throughout the auditorium - replete with its unsightly carpet, grubbily uniform chairs, plastic tables and mirror balls. There's the hard-edged manager and her team of three assistants who clean, serve drinks and snacks, flirt with the customers, and sing cheesy three-part harmony introductions to each new bingo game. There are frustrations in the ranks, particularly when the bingo caller belatedly arrives for his shift, clearly disillusioned with the job as with life. You get a strong sense that his threats to walk out on the outfit - which is struggling to make ends meet within the recession - are daily.
 
When the fifteen or so customers arrive for the morning session, we're moving further into a landscape of battered dreams. It's like an alternative cast of 'Coronation Street' (or perhaps that's the Manchester accents). There are lonely old-aged pensioners, retired couples, a mother and her daughter who's between nursing shifts, some unemployed women, a flirtatious lady of a certain age... they're all likeable, well-drawn individuals. What's interesting is the way they're used as a Greek chorus for the piece, speaking in unison and individually of their hopes and dreams : of what it means to believe in the possibility of winning. The piece presumes that it's easy for the audience to look down on these individuals who have enough empty time in their daily lives to turn up for weekday bingo on a very regular basis. But we're soon persuaded that we're seeing something far finer here : the sheer strength of the human impulse not to give up hope.
 
There's humour and drama along the way, but the kitchen sink dramas are coupled with choral poetry that resonates widely. It's very much like an 'Under Milk Wood' of a bingo hall - we grow to develop insights into these individuals and into our society of credit debt and obsessive materialism.
 
But it's certainly not a piece that lets us judge from a distance. We're soon guided to find bingo cards on clipboards beneath our seats, then led through a practice bingo game, playing along with the onstage characters. Along the way we're introduced to various aspects of bingo culture - like the dabbers, and when the window of opportunity is for making a winning call. You can feel the energy in the room surge as the audience participates, and it's all so much fun - both playing the game and being this actively involved in the play - that almost everyone in the audience buys a ticket in the interval so they can participate in the 'evening game' of the second half. In this, we're playing 'for real', as there's a cash prize up for grabs. Somehow this all seems to make the excitement more real too.
 
There are show-stopping moments of real heart, like when one long-time player wins a game and leads the whole cast and audience in a rousing rendition of 'Que Sera Sera'... (I guess you had to be there.) The piece is beautifully crafted. It doesn't rest on the gimmick of the audience playing bingo within the play, but develops strong moments of conflict and pathos between the characters, and achieves a wonderful balance between exposing the grimy social reality of the bingo hall attendees, and indulging in the neon-lit, glitter ball dream of that potential win - the hope of which is what's keeping everyone going.