By Kalman Dean-Richards

Opportunity is like money: a shiny toy with which a fortunate few may always play, while the rest of us scrap for a little time with it. Carol Ann Duffy and Friends, now in its eleventh series at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, highlights the importance of sharing opportunity.

Under the same spotlight, on the same intimate stage, over the same ninety minutes on Monday night, stands the full spectrum – from the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, through nationally renowned poets, to current Manchester Metropolitan University students.

“Yesterday, I drank,” Keith Lander begins, having just filled his second glass of red of today. “I drank all the jokes about drunks/I drank in my sleep … I drank myself stupid and back again.” He is a veteran of the spoken word scene, and it shows in calm in his voice and the relax in his shoulders. When he talks of time spent on a Spanish beach, drinking beer again, the stage around him becomes that place, and he the character within it. Alone, in the sunny spotlight, he is at home.

“There are ample opportunities outside of this,” Lander tells me, colder backstage. He runs The Dear List, which goes some way to proving his point. But there’s still room for doubt. How often does someone relatively unestablished get to perform alongside artists who are of true quality, rather than “some guy who wanted to announce that he was a cross-dresser” (a story belonging to John Fennelly)? Are opportunities of this quality so abundant?

Amy McCauley, Poetry Editor of New Welsh Review, steps next in front of the old red settee that in my mind smells of cigarettes and faintly of gravy. She introduces her pieces with a decreasing number of fingers, and the Thunderbirds announcer calls out silently. “I’ve heard of age: how it gobbles the time” – two fingers – is, like the whole of her set: tactile, and physically engaging to the extent that there seemed no time for notes. See for yourself (stage-right).

It’s difficult, McCauley and I agree, because the students and former students of tonight had to front course fees to be there. Duffy herself, though, later assures me “It’s not part of the MA course” – these are her chosen poets.

They certainly seem worthy of sharing a stage with her.

Fennelly, a teacher for thirty years prior to enrolling at the Manchester Writing School, is finally doing what he had always told his pupils to do: “Putting [his] money where [his] mouth is.” He has waited a long time, and now because of his quality, and bold decision-making, he is rewarded.

It’s what the rich boys with shiny toys will tell you; this is how the world works. Whether that reality sustains itself beyond this theatre on this night is trickier. But Fennelly reads on, describing the ‘Improbable manner of different stars dance’ and trembling slightly as he hovers over the wondrous nature of snow and snowflakes, his words slipping into one another rapidly and never jolting. He holds up a hair-clip that needs no real explanation, for Memento, and the shuffling of the largely student audience ceases. “Half a lifetime later,” the poem’s refrain, is horribly sad, and wonderful.

Liz Venn represents best-case scenario of this kind of opportunity-sharing event. She is the House Poet of the series, and a former student of Duffy, who she will later introduce. Venn tells a cutting story, thematically similar to Memento, of the digital and otherwise remnants of a lost love. Her sweetness is heartbreaking, and her control tantalising.

Then comes Duffy. When the Dame appears briefly, “popping up, like toast,” to speak a little and to tell us about her special guest, she reads from a book that she has been asked to sign a copy of in the interval. Students titter. “It’s not funny,” she smiles. “I’m a set text.” Power is never far from the discussion in art, even if it’s in joke-form.

Duffy’s effortless catch-phrasing continues when she presents Sean Borodale – “The man sitting beside me, who looks like one of the Beatles from Rubber Soul or Revolver,” she reckons. It’s Rubber Soul, for sure.

Borodale reads from two collections, and is scientific and strange, in both subject matter and demeanour. His name already some way to being made, this is the opportunity to sell books. Human Work was written on a notepad beside the stove, and concerns ‘the intricate alchemy of food’. “It bellows and blows,” he commentates, “A garden’s agony I stir quiet.”

It’s intense, and then it’s over.

How unfortunate that opportunities like this are as rare as they are.