The Progressive Players

In honor of the 80,000 sq. ft. installation upcoming Strange Cargo installation at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle, here's a link to the Little Theater, home to the Progressive Players. The company was formed in 1920 and moved into the theatre after it was built in 1943, during WW2.

Their web site has a pretty interesting history of the theater:

Then there were the German bombers. One clear night in early Spring of 1943, the moon shone bright and everyone said, “They’ll come tonight if they ever do.” They did come, but before they arrived a thick white frost mist had covered the town and clouds had hidden the moon and the bombs fell in Saltwell Park, harmlessly, as far as the population was concerned. However one bomb exploded among the trees just opposite the front of the theatre, which had just been finished, blowing in the windows and still worse, the doors, which could not be made to work smoothly for long afterwards, and the trunk of a tree fell through the roof.

The Progressive Players partnered with Grennan and Sperandio in 2000 to make their film The Hand and the Word, available from Printed Matter.