Them Off The Viz! Newcastle upon Tyne
Anyone who has read Chris Donald’s hugely entertaining memoir, Rude Kids, will know that he isn’t a man given to the po-faced stoking of his own mystique. But when your mystique is essentially built around a roughly photocopied comic containing lots of cocks, farts and massive gonads, that’s probably for the best. Of course, Viz evolved well beyond that description, eventually becoming a surprisingly acute satirical organ (fnarr fnarr) containing lots of cocks, farts and massive gonads. This event sounds entirely in keeping with the Viz aesthetic – in as much as it could well be complete chaos. It is ostensibly a Q&A with Donald and his brother and partner-in-crime Simon, but the event is to be helmed by Tyneside’s most eccentric magician, cabaret artist and escapologist Chris Cross, so who knows how far it might stray from that humdrum premise. Likely to be memorable, in any event.
Tyne Theatre & Opera House, Tue & Wed
PH
V&A Presents: From Woodstock To Wilderness, nr Chipping Norton
Wilderness is a perfect example of the new breed of festival: not so much a boundary-dissolving utopia as a thinking man’s theme park, where music and mild hedonism are just two elements in a weekend that takes in “feasts” by top chefs and educative debates and talks. That wasn’t always the case, though, and this year, as part of the Wilderness talks programme, V&A theatre and performance curators Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh will be on hand to dissect how the modern festival landscape was formed. Broackes and Marsh are the pair behind the museum’s extraordinary David Bowie Is exhibition, and this talk is being given in anticipation of their 2016 V&A exhibition on 1960s culture and politics. As such, they’ll be focusing their analysis on Woodstock and the cultural climate that gave birth to it, as well as explaining how they go about transforming artefacts into an immersive exhibition experience.
Wilderness Festival, Cornbury Park, Fri
RA
Michael Morpugo Presents… , Chichester
A reading and talk at which the audience should all have had time to read the book. Michael Morpurgo’s latest, Listen To The Moon, was published last year to coincide with the centenary commemorations of the first world war. That conflict, and the author’s desire to analyse war anew by seeing it through innocents’ eyes, are among the many familiar themes Morpurgo draws on in his story of how a foundling exposes faultlines of paranoia and fear in the Scilly Isles in 1915. (There’s also a sunken ship, in this case the torpedoed British ocean liner RMS Lusitania, and a redemptive horse.) It’s a doorstopper of a book with a split narrative that’s more advanced than some of Morpurgo’s other work, but the avuncular former children’s laureate is an old hand at contextualising his stories on stage for the benefit of younger readers. The event serves as a warm-up for Running Wild, a new stage version of Morpurgo’s 2009 novel that opens in Chichester on Sunday (to 16 Aug).
Chichester Festival Theatre, Sat
JS
