LONDON POETRY
Proletarian Poetry: Poetry of Working-Class Lives
The Poetry Cafe
Betterton Street, WC2
June 27

Proletarian Poetry is a home for poets and poems that portray working-class lives from many different angles — corrugated iron and bricks, brass bands, rogues, grandparents, historical figures, imprisoned poets, the contradictions of capitalism and communism, suffragettes, homeless, transgender revolutionaries, postmen, bookmakers and many, many more. This is a chance to hear some of its top exponents, such as Jo Bell, Malika Booker (pictured) Inua Ellams, Owen Gallagher, Hannah Lowe and Joolz Sparkes in an evening hosted by Peter Maynard.
piezoelectricity

MANCHESTER EXHIBITION
Show Me The Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present
July 11-January 24
People’s History Museum
Left Bank, Spinning Fields

What does “the market” look like? What does money really stand for? How can the abstractions of high finance be made visible? These are some of the questions this exhibition seeks to answer as it charts how the financial world has been imagined in art, illustration, photography and other visual media over the last three centuries in Britain and the US. It asks too how artists have grappled with the increasingly intangible and self-referential nature of money and finance, from the South Sea Bubble of the 18th century to the global financial crisis of 2008. It features works ranging from satirical 18th-century prints by William Hogarth and James Gillray to newly commissioned art by Goldin+Senneby, Cornford & Cross, Immo Klink, Simon Roberts, James O Jenkins and Molly Crabapple.
phm.org.uk

LONDON THEATRE
Constellations
Whitehall, SW1
July 9-August 1

If you want something a bit more than a typical boy-meets-girl summer romcom, try Nick Payne’s hugely acclaimed Constellations. It tells the story of beekeeper Roland who meets quantum cosmologist Marianne at a party and, in the ensuing 60-minute interchange between the couple, Payne crams in a challenging meditation on how the theory of relativity is at odds with quantum mechanics, with the possibility that maybe we exist in a multiverse where different outcomes can exist simultaneously. Intrigued? You surely will be.
trafalgar-studios.co.uk

NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE EXHIBITION

Henri Matisse + Pablo Picasso: Late Prints

University Gallery
Sandyford Road
July 18-September 11

These exhibitions of late print work by two of the last century’s great artists include etchings, lithographs and linocuts. Particularly striking are lithographs like Le Cheval de Cirque (pictured) by Picasso, while the Matisse work on display, along with his prints, includes some of his “drawing with scissors,” the exuberant cut-outs he produced in the last four years of his life.
universitygallery.co.uk