James Mills is a web developer in the North East of England and founder of Refresh Teesside »
Mike Hughes is the Head of Business for the Evening Gazette. He will be blogging on all matters of importance to Teesside businesses - and some that are just worth knowing »
Jez Davison, business writer at the Evening Gazette, is a regular blogger on all things business - particularly finance, entrepreneurship and the state of the Teesside economy » 
Karen McLauchlan is the Evening Gazette's deputy business and features editor - with special interest in all things industry, property and arts related » 
Jeremy Middleton is a venture capitalist and the co-founder of FTSE-200 company HomeServe » 
Deloitte, which has 23 offices across the UK including Newcastle, is among the country's leading professional services firms » 
ClimateNE & Climate Change Schools Project support the move to a low-carbon, resilient economy and help businesses avoid risk and realise commercial opportunities. Posts by Jen Atkinson, Krista McKinzey and Harriet Thew » Last week, two things happened. One is more than covered here and across the media, the financial world came apart at it's core. The other was not entirely unconnected. I went to see the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of The Merchant Of Venice at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle.
One of the central themes of the play is basically capitalism - investment, trade, lending and the consequences both of defaulting and being hard headed in your pursuit of debt.
I won't bombard you with quotes from the play. In fact I'm sure somewhere a proper journalist will have already made the comparisons line by line between Shylocks risk assessment of Antonio and Antonio's faith in his investments and the current financial strife. There is a view that Shakespeare wrote Merchant as a reaction to the growing capitalism of the day as a warning to others. I think we can safely say that however many children (and future Bank Chief Executives) have read this and other Shakespeare plays at school, that message has never really got through. Hopefully though at least one person in each class went away a little bit more engaged, a little bit more curious and a little bit more intrigued. I know I did.
It's one of the things I love about Shakespeare and many other artists and art forms. They hold a mirror up to our lives and actions and they entreat us to react. Much of the time they are dismissed as something you have to study in school, or are too complicated or 'too arty' but if you stop, just for a second and take it in you can really learn a lot from the arts. Some of it is practical ("neither a lender of a borrower be") but most of all, all of it is enjoyable to someone somewhere.
At the height of the problems last week The Times published an article under the headline "City gloom, arts boom: let's face the music and dance, sing and laugh". The point of the article was that whilst all around us the financial sector and the economy is heading towards bust, cultural life in the country is at an all time boom. So what are you waiting for? Take a moment and have a look at what's on at the fantastic wealth of cultural assets we have in the region and if only for a moment be transfixed and transported to somewhere else.
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