The play's the thing...

[shewhomust]

But first we spent the afternoon playing. mantichore was in town for desperance's play, and had to be shown the town: lunch at Northern Stage, a tour of the Lit & Phil, with a sidestep through the door which links the library of the Lit & Phil with the library of the adjacent Mining Institute, and down to the perfect miniature lecture theatre - amphitheatre - below. The statutory visit to the Vampire Rabbit, then along the Quayside to the Baltic.

The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art is an imposing building - an old flour mill rising sheer as a cliff by the Tyne - devoted to contemporary art. So there's always something worth looking at there, but for me that's usually the view from the top floor. We do it properly, though, climbing the stairs and stopping off to look at the exhibitions. On this occasion, we were gazing at Subodh Gupta's stacks and stacks of shiny metal bowls, roped off and labelled as closed for maintenance, trying to work out whether this was the finished work - it did look rather like a futuristic cityscape from the cover of a pulp magazine - just awaiting polishing, or whether these were the artist's raw materials, still to be assembled. Which I suppose is as valid a response as any. While we were debating, another visitor came looking for the lifts, and paused to tell us that this was his first visit to the Baltic, but he was waiting for his wife who was doing a poetry course at the University; so of course we had to ask who his wife was, and of course it was Maureen Almond, whom we know, desperance well, and I less well... Because desperance knows everyone.

None of us much liked Joseph Havel's work on the next floor, but we enjoyed the Vik Muniz portraits - mostly familiar portraits recreated in unexpected marerials and then photographed: Elvis depicted in chocolate, Garbo in diamonds, the Creature from the Black Lagoon in caviar, Lewis Carroll's photograph of Alice Liddell lovingly recreated in brightly coloured plastic toys (click the top circle on this site to see it). It was entertaining and intriguing in much the same way as a good colour-supplement feature. Whereas Brian Eno's Constellations, more bright colours but this time in slowly shifting patterns, accompanied by ambient music, would have been ideal to soothe and distract frazzled travellers in an airport lounge.

And by now it was time to head for the theatre...