Cultured. On Sunday 19.07.26
Our weekend edition this week featuring Fringe stories, flashmobs on bicycles, fresh new music and cultural adventures aplenty
Hello and welcome to this week’s Cultured. On Sunday.
August is approaching, which in arts and culture circles triggers north of the border attention… the Edinburgh Fringe is almost upon us.
This week, we’ve got a double helping Fringe-related stories, with comedy collective Felt Nowt preparing to take over an entire venue with North East comedy talent and Live Theatre getting ready to launch a packed Fringe preview mini-season in Newcastle.
Elsewhere, we catch up with North Shields singer-songwriter Katie Grace as she follows her Mouth of the Tyne Festival return performance with a new single, while Sunderland’s Mickey Callisto (Britain’s Got Talent, viral Queen-themed flashmobs) looks ahead to a headline hometown show as part of The Fire Station’s busy Summer Parties schedule.
David Whetstone ventures into another new exhibition at BALTIC, I finally put into words my thoughts on Rachel Stockdale’s Mother?, and Collected Books has this week’s bookshelf recommendation.
Happy end of the weekend one and all.
PS: A quick heads-up. A visit to Beyond Van Gogh at Utilita Arena Newcastle offered the perfect appetiser for my upcoming Provençal escape. From Tuesday I'll be swapping the Tyne for the Rhône for a couple of weeks. While Curated Culture will continue to land in your inbox every Tuesday as normal, Friday’s Culture Digest will be a little lighter until August 7 and Cultured. On Sunday is taking a short summer break until August 9.
Au revoir et à bientôt!
Making the Fringe less fringe for North East comics
For decades, the Edinburgh Fringe has been one of comedy's most important shop windows. Careers have been launched there, agents and producers have discovered new talent, and performers have taken big steps towards making a living from stand-up.
Bit it’s also become prohibitively expensive. For many comedians, the costs of accommodation, venue hire, marketing and simply surviving a month in the Scottish capital have turned the world’s biggest arts festival into an opportunity they can no longer afford.
Rather than accepting that reality, North East comedy collective Felt Nowt has decided to do something about it.
This August, the not-for-profit co-operative will take over an entire Fringe venue, filling it exclusively with comedians from the North East in a bid to make the festival more accessible, more affordable and more collaborative for performers who might otherwise never have made it there.
Running from August 7-31 at The Garrett at The Alchemist on George Street (venue 401), the programme will showcase everyone from award-winning comedians to performers making their Fringe debut.
The month-long residency is the collective's most ambitious project to date, but comedian Jake Donaldson says it's rooted in the same aim that has driven Felt Nowt since it was founded during lockdown.
The last stop before Edinburgh: Live Theatre launches Fringe previews
Newcastle audiences will have the chance to see a host of comedy, theatre and music performances before they head to the world’s biggest arts festival when Live Theatre launches a five day run of Edinburgh Fringe previews later this month.
Running from July 28 to August 1, the Quayside venue will stage two performances a day, giving artists the opportunity to test new work in front of North East audiences before travelling north to the Edinburgh Fringe, which runs from August 7-31.
The programme brings together established comedians, emerging theatre companies, musicians and performance artists from across the UK, alongside North East names.
Katie Grace goes back to the future
For Katie Grace last weekend’s starring role on the all-new Sunday For Sammy stage, a welcome addition to Sunday’s Mouth Of The Tyne Festival slate, felt like a full circle moment.
Not only was the former King’s School pupil back on Tynemouth’s Front Street, where she learnt her trade as an 11-year-old busker, but her return evoked fond memories of 2025’s full band show within the walls of the village’s famous Priory.
“Playing with the Sunday For Sammy crew was such a lovely gig — it was really cool to be able to see my old busking pitch from the stage,” says the London-based artist and former winner of the prestigious Alan Hull Award for Songwriting.
“I also got the chance to catch up with so many of the people I’d met through the community music projects I was part of growing up and it was brilliant to be able to map that trajectory from where I was then to where I am now.
Mickey Callisto heads home for Summer Parties headline slot
When I catch up with Mickey Callisto, he’s in Monaco.
Not on holiday, exactly - although he’s not complaining. More accurately, he’s leading the charge for a gloriously ambitious Queen-themed flash mob involving opera singers on balconies, choirs on bicycles, violinists appearing from nowhere and brass bands arriving in limousines.
“It’s good fun for me - and a free holiday,” he laughs.
A couple of months later he’ll be back in Sunderland, swapping the Mediterranean sunshine for The Fire Station’s Summer Parties and a headline slot in the venue’s Parade Ground.
That kind of joyful unpredictability seems to follow the Sunderland-born singer around these days.
One week he’s singing in front of millions on Britain’s Got Talent. The next he’s performing at a wedding in Florence after the couple spotted him on television and flew him to Italy. Somewhere in between are European festivals, Queen shows, writing sessions for a new album and gigs with Serbian collaborators Cosmic ahead of a US tour next year.
“It’s what you sign up for,” he says.
“I could still be working in the phone shop, do you know what I mean? I’m very grateful that this is my life.”
Past, present and future blend in vivid Chitra Ganesh show
Baltic demonstrates its commitment to both the local and the exotic with its two big summer exhibitions.
Inevitably it was the former that got the lion’s share of attention over this month’s opening weekend.
Photographs by the late Tish Murtha (more feted now than in life) open a window on our past, showing our places and people – raggedy kids, a bustling street life, pubs and industrial strife.
Displayed alongside, as modern counterpoint, are images by contemporary North East photographer Kuba Ryniewicz (Newcastle by way of Poland).
Go up a floor, though, and you enter a compelling but less familiar world as envisaged by Chitra Ganesh, its highlight being a new animation called – somewhat ironically - Journey to the Great Below.
Being premiered here, it plays simultaneously on two screens, one rectangular and one circular, and was inspired, we are told, by The Descent of Inanna into the Underworld, written in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and part of Iran) nearly 4,000 years ago and reckoned to be the world’s oldest recorded myth.
Inanna, Sumerian goddess of love, fecundity and war, also known as the Queen of Heaven, embarks on a dangerous journey to face her sister (and dark alter ego) Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld.
The poem describes Inanna’s confrontation with death and eventual return to the world of the living.
The vivid film, while channelling age-old mythology, has a 21st Century gaming vibe, blending ancient, modern and futuristic imagery that also seems to chime (hope this isn’t sacrilegious) with the current tattoo fad.
REVIEW: Mother? at Live Theatre
Rachel Stockdale doesn’t waste any time setting the scene in Mother?.
The stage is awash with toys, toddler paraphernalia and the organised chaos that anyone who has raised young children will recognise. I found myself unexpectedly nostalgic - especially at the sight of the miniature IKEA kitchen that once occupied a corner of our own house for the best part of a decade.
It was worth its weight in Petit Filous yoghurts.
But while the props evoke the practical realities of family life, Mother? isn’t simply a play about raising children. It began with Stockdale asking herself a much more personal question: did she actually want to become a parent?
That uncertainty became the starting point for more than 100 conversations with mothers, fathers and primary carers, whose stories now form the backbone of this thoughtful one-woman show.
When I interviewed Stockdale before a script had even been written, she spoke about wanting to create a space where people could be honest about parenting without immediately feeling obliged to add, “But I love my children.” That desire to explore the contradictions of family life without judgement is what gives Mother? its emotional weight.
Founded by Emma Hamlett, Collected Books is an independent bookshop in Durham, with two floors of books to browse as well as coffee, wine, and cake to enjoy. They specialise in writing by women but stock all genres of fiction and non-fiction as well as books for kids, YA titles, poetry, and classics.
Emma says: This week our bookseller Morgan recommends Sheila Armstrong’s phenomenal new novel The Red Mouth – a powerful depiction of a single landscape that brings together four strangers, a story that amplifies the significance of a place and its secrets.
Morgan says: The Red Mouth follows a series of perspectives that are quietly interconnected by the same Irish bog. The landscape reveals mysterious objects and bodies which bind together four characters over several decades. If you enjoy Claire Keegan’s character studies, but wish they were longer, then this book is for you!
We are loving our boggy, muddy, land-rooted reads at the moment: from Maggie O’Farrell’s Land to Anna Goldreich’s The Leveret via Life Cycle of a Moth from Rowe Irvin and Bog Queen from Anna North. Sheila Armstrong’s new book is right at the head of this pack. A wonderfully written, rich book that follows its characters over a lifetime, the novel depicts a landscape that is oozing with life – fantastic!
When a dog finds a strange, alien antler in a restored bog, the owner’s first thought is to keep it for himself. But when he realises the value of his find, he is drawn back to the rich peat to keep searching. It is not one stag skeleton that is buried there, but dozens – an ancient dying ground of the Great Irish Elk.
Other things have surfaced from the bog: prehistoric settlements, bronze cauldrons, ancient butter, iron weapons – and the mutilated body of a two-thousand-year-old female. Fifty years ago, a young archaeologist named her Belroe Woman and dedicated his life to telling the story of her sacrificial death. While state and public treat the bog body as a national treasure, others must reckon with its otherworldly influence over their lives: the peat-cutter who first unearthed her and carries this discovery like a curse; the archaeologist’s daughter who grows up in the shadow of the bog’s strange magnetism; and the young environmental scientist whose work draws her back to where it all began.
Haunting and lyrical, The Red Mouth - an béal rua - is the story of two discoveries and the four strangers who become intertwined in their wake. The deep time of the bog is both mystical and sinister: those bound to it must decide what to bury and what to unearth. Get the book from our website now!
