Booze or culture? Whatever Chris Donald, co-founder of Viz, argues in his film A Picture of Newcastle (on BBC3 tonight at 11.25pm), you don't actually have to choose for a night out on Tyneside. Live Theatre was on the Quay long before the glittering arts institutions or the smart new bars. Using the work of writers from Jack Common and Sid Chaplin to Alan Plater and Lee Hall, it has specialised in stories with all the flavour of brown ale and more durability. Take your drink in.
Now Peter Flannery, author of Our Friends in the North, has transferred Zola's Thérèse Raquin to Victorian Newcastle, with macabre jokes that even Chris Donald might laugh at.
In his version, it is only Thérèse and not her lover, Laurent, who sees the ghost of her husband, Camille, after they have drowned him. Laurent has been to the morgue and seen what the river does to corpses. Camille won't walk, he says; his feet have dropped off. And Michaud, the retired Geordie policeman who is our sympathetic guide to the drama, remarks that if we eat eels from the river, we become accessories to murder.
Flannery ends the play not with the double suicide of the novel but with the utterly unlikable Laurent (Ben Porter) drowning the dangerously crazed Thérèse (Jill Halfpenny); it is her tragedy. Unfortunately, Zola is not interested enough in Thérèse as a person to give us much reason to share her terrible journey. Halfpenny, forced to remain impassive at the outset, is tough and moving in her portrayal of Thérèse's descent into madness. But the novel's obsession with "the human beast" has more in common with the single intense arc of Greek tragedy than with Flannery's instinctive empathy.
Maggie Norris's production is broad, sexy and atmospheric, thanks to murky lighting and a cinematic soundtrack. The evening is always engaging and when Camille's mother (Anny Tobin), crippled by a stroke, attempts to communicate what she knows, it is genuinely gripping.
· Until July 30. Box office: 0191-232 1232 .
