A blog on Newcastle Arts and Culture, Cinema and Life.
The best cinemas show more than just films. Cinema auditoriums are now spaces in which to enjoy the latest plays and operas, experience live music alongside silent classics and, thanks to Mamma Mia, indulge in karaoke sing-a-longs. Ever a passionate advocate of the versatility of the cinema screen, Newcastle’s Tyneside Cinema played host to Manet: [...]
It may seem strange for a film about genocide to open with a sex scene, but for historical drama Lidice it couldn’t be more fitting. A film that ends with mass murder, Lidice is for the most part bursting with life. In memory of the hundreds of men, women and children murdered by Nazi’s in [...]
Enter Newcastle’s distinguished Laing Art Gallery and you will hear a strange clicking noise. At first it sounds like the chirping of crickets in long grass, but if you listen more closely you’ll notice the sound is different to that made by insects in the wild. This sound is more rhythmic and tinny – like [...]
From the moment you settle into your posh velvet seat, you have a pretty good idea of what to expect from the lively new production of The Ladykillers, currently showing at the Theatre Royal. The dignified warbling of wartime radio stars fills the auditorium and on stage a gloriously twee English suburban house sits expectantly, [...]
Newcastle does vintage. It certainly does, doesn’t it. Rolling into town like a travelling circus of horse-drawn carts and gypsy caravans with more eighties polyester blouses, Royal family memorabilia and penguin paperbacks than all the old people’s homes in the North East, Newcastle Does Vintage pulled up to the Theatre Royal last Saturday and set [...]
B.Y.O.B. Is there ever a more welcome acronym than that? Many of us have grown accustomed to forking out more than our hourly rate of pay for a decent cocktail in this city (I’m looking at you Al Vino’s). Undeniably, there’s pleasure be found at the bottom of a carefully sugar-dusted martini glass, but can’t [...]
After months spent standing to attention on the walls of the Shipley Art Gallery, an elegant collection of portraits have finally been allowed a moment’s respite away from the gaze of the public. Their well-earned break makes way for the prestigious Jerwood Makers Open, a new exhibition of work by five of the most exceptional [...]
Photographer Dean Chapman remembers preparing breakfast for his wife and children, on Friday 11th March 2011, when the first reports of an earthquake in Japan broke on the radio. Forty five miles off Japan’s north east coast, a colossal earthquake had struck deep beneath the Pacific Ocean, resulting in a Tsunami of unprecedented scale and [...]
It’s seven o’clock on a Wednesday evening and three hundred people have assembled in the particularly apt location of Newcastle’s Assembly Rooms. On the speaker’s table sits writer Lee Hall, novelist Ann Cleeves, Paul Gilroy from NCU, playwright Peter Mortimer and library worker Rachel Kirk. People settle into their seats with notebooks at the ready [...]
To me, Norman Cornish has always seemed to be a painfully romantic character. Working at the Dean and Chapter colliery near Ferryhill from the age of fourteen, Cornish spent much of his working life as a miner, enduring the daily back-breaking toil and hours of suffocating darkness of the pits. Yet, with no money, little [...]
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