As Newcastle continues to grow apace, so its drama scene is evolving, with Newcastle Theatre Company, among others, bidding to entice a new, younger audience into the theatre.
While it remains a semi-professional arena, with everybody involved giving their time for the smell of an oily rag, the quality of staging, directing and acting is impressively high, and the city is blessed with an array of accomplished playwrights, including Vanessa Bates, Ross Mueller and multi-Conda award winner Carl Caulfield.
Caulfield, an actor, director and prolific playwright, has been making theatre in Newcastle for 25 years, mostly with his company, Stray Dogs.
He has not one, but two, new plays opening here soon.
The first, The Fine Art of Deception, runs at Newcastle Theatre Company, in De Vitre Street, Lambton, between May 6-21.
Described by its director, Leanne Mueller, as being "like Tarantino on stage", the play is set in contemporary Chelsea, in London.
It stars Claire Williams, as model and gallery owner Suzanne Faith, who once posed for the painter Francis Bacon and dated Rolling Stone, Keith Richards, in the late 1960s.
Caulfield, who also appears in the show, as Fulton Finch, a mercenary art thief plotting to get his hands on Francis Bacon's dysmorphic but priceless portrait of Faith, calls the play "an entertainment" and "a contemporary thriller".
It grew from an encounter in a Soho pub, over a decade ago.
"The story I heard that night stayed with me," Caulfield says.
"And, over the years, the London-based friend I was with then, kept asking me, 'when are you going to write that play about it?'
"The pub had been Francis Bacon's local, and I've always been interested in his art.
"He was kind of a vivisectionist, carving people up."
So, when NTC Patron Caulfield was asked to contribute a play to the company's 2022 main season, he set about converting what he calls "the writing between your ears" into The Fine Art of Deception, his 26th play.
The result, set in the rarefied London art world, is a comic thriller in the tradition of Dial M for Murder. About money, art and friendship, the play shreds Britain's still thriving class system and its potential for envy and resentment.
It also reflects on "the savagery" of London, where a prominent and seedy underbelly coexists with unfathomable wealth, particularly in areas such as Chelsea, with its galleries, chichi boutiques and mansions owned by oligarchs and the privileged British elite.
"Just because it's a thriller doesn't mean it isn't saying something about rapacity and human greed," Caulfield says.
"I'm a playwright who believes that the theatre should be audacious, and going into subjects we are not supposed to talk about."
Creativity, Caulfield's other play to premiere in Newcastle this year, opens at the Civic Theatre on July 8. It is billed as a hard-hitting satire, with music, exploring not just the crisis facing the humanities in our universities but the existential threat facing the Arts in general.
Caulfield is clearly both hardworking and anything but predictable.
His eclectic oeuvre includes two plays about Shakespeare, one concerning the Bard's relationship with his fools and another, Where late the Songbird, about his last days, a one-man show about comedian Peter Sellers, which began life in Newcastle before appearing at the Edinburgh Festival and in London, in 2010, and a dystopian thriller called 2039.
"Shakespeare is a good example," he says, while seamlessly referencing other influences and inspirations including writers JB Priestley, Arnold Wesker, Graham Greene, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter, "that you can write King Lear but also have scope for A Midsummer Night's Dream."
If new writing is the lifeblood of theatre, then Newcastle is fortunate to have Carl Caulfield at the core of a group of local playwrights creating vital, original work and contributing to the city's burgeoning cultural space.
The Fine Art of Deception, featuring a fine cast that also includes Kris McCourt, as handyman Marty Green, Tracey Gordon, as Suzanne's best friend Margo Ryan, and Mick Byrne, as flamboyant art collector Daniel Field, opens at Newcastle Theatre Company on Friday, May 6.
