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There are films that age. There are films that survive. And then there is Metropolis - Fritz Lang’s 1927 vision of a future city where the powerful live above ground, workers labour below, technology promises progress while tightening its grip, and the machine is never just a machine.
Nearly 100 years later, that future has not exactly passed us by. It has become uncomfortably familiar.
This autumn, Metropolis comes to the UK not as a restored artefact for silent film purists, but as something louder, stranger and more immediate: a live cinematic concert by Vox Lumiere, the Los Angeles-based company whose work re-scores silent cinema for contemporary audiences. Their production pairs Lang’s film with an original rock-operatic score, performed live by vocalists and musicians in sync with the images on screen.
Or, as creator and composer Kevin Saunders Hayes puts it: “rock concert meets silent film.”
The UK tour opens at Birmingham’s Old Rep on 8 September 2026 before travelling across the country. For northern audiences, the dates are particularly strong: Lowther Pavilion in Lytham St Annes on 16 September; The Tung Auditorium in Liverpool on 19 September; The Fire Station in Sunderland on 22 September; King’s Hall in Ilkley on 25 September; Playhouse Whitley Bay on 8 October; and The Plaza in Stockport on 11 October. Vox Lumiere’s own listings describe the show as an “explosive live experience with original music and powerhouse vocals”, with performances generally running from 7.30pm.
The northern itinerary is important. Because Metropolis has always been about more than futuristic design and cinematic spectacle. It is about work, power, inequality, industrial imagination and the human cost of systems built without sufficient regard for the people inside them. In other words, it is a film whose questions have never belonged only to Berlin, Hollywood or the museum archive. They belong, very much, to the North.
Lang’s film is often described as one of the defining works of science fiction. The BFI calls it “the grandest science fiction film of the silent era” and notes its vision of a megacity in which the masses work for the benefit of a ruling elite. UNESCO, which inscribed Metropolis in its Memory of the World Register, describes the film as a landmark of German silent cinema and as a work whose combination of film and architecture became a model of the future.
But the reason Metropolis still lands is not simply because it predicted future cityscapes. It predicted an argument.
Who benefits from technology? Who is displaced by it? Who gets to call automation progress? Who is asked to trust systems they did not design, cannot see inside, and may ultimately be sacrificed to maintain?
In 1927, those questions were framed through the machine halls, the robot Maria, the divided city and the workers beneath the surface. In 2026, they arrive amid artificial intelligence, platform labour, surveillance capitalism, precarious employment, exhausted public services and the creeping sense that the future is being written by people who will not have to live with its sharpest consequences.
That is why Vox Lumiere’s version is more than a clever touring concept. The company’s whole practice is based on refusing to treat silent cinema as a sealed-off historical form. Its slogan - “Silents you can hear” - is less a gag than a manifesto. Vox Lumiere describes its work as transforming iconic silent films into live experiences using original music and vocals: “a rock concert, theatrical event, and cinematic journey rolled into one.”
There is something democratic about that approach. It does not ask modern audiences to approach a silent classic with reverence and folded hands. It invites them into it through volume, rhythm, performance and feeling. It says: this film is not dead; it is waiting to be reactivated.
For a northern audience, the reactivation is particularly resonant. The North knows what it means to be told that technology and economic transformation are inevitable. It knows the language of modernisation. It knows the promise of new industries, the pain of old ones being dismantled, the cultural aftershocks of decisions made elsewhere, and the long argument over whether “progress” is something done with communities or to them.
Metropolis is not, of course, a documentary about northern England. It is a German Expressionist epic shaped by Weimar anxiety, industrial modernity and the visual imagination of a filmmaker stunned by skyscrapers and machinery. But its central image - a city divided between those who command and those who keep the system running - travels very well.
It travels to Sunderland, where culture is increasingly being understood not as civic decoration but as social infrastructure. It travels to Liverpool, a city that has always understood music, class and global exchange as part of the same story. It travels to Ilkley, Lytham St Annes, Whitley Bay and Stockport - places where touring work can sometimes do something more interesting than simply “arrive”: it can test big ideas against local audiences, local histories and local imaginations.
Vox Lumiere’s production also comes at a useful moment for how we think about performance itself. Across the country, venues are fighting for audiences while trying to make the case that live work still matters in an age of infinite streaming. A project like this answers that argument not by rejecting screen culture, but by transforming it. The film remains. The screen remains. But the music is alive, the bodies are in the room, and the audience experiences cinema as an event rather than content.
That distinction feels increasingly important.
Hayes has said the intention is not to present Metropolis as a relic. The point, rather, is to let it speak in a language audiences can feel now. That is a smart formulation, because the danger with canonical works is that they can become embalmed by their own importance. Everyone agrees they matter; fewer people actually encounter them as dangerous, exhilarating or strange.
Vox Lumiere appears to want the danger back.
The company has been developing this kind of work for more than two decades, staging original scored productions synchronised with classic silent cinema. The press materials note that Vox Lumiere has performed more than 300 shows across six countries to more than one million audience members, and that Hayes has scored more than 50 feature films, including two Academy Award-nominated documentaries. The result is not film accompaniment in the old-fashioned sense, but a hybrid form: part concert, part theatre, part cinema, part cultural resurrection.
And Metropolis is a particularly rich subject for resurrection because it has never stopped mutating. Its imagery has fed science fiction, music videos, fashion, architecture and political imagination. Its robot remains one of cinema’s most recognisable figures. Its city still looks like a warning disguised as a design triumph. Its anxieties about automation, spectacle and social fracture are now mainstream concerns.
What was once futuristic is now a kind of Gothic realism.
There is also something pleasingly awkward about bringing such a large, visionary, technologically haunted film into regional theatres and concert spaces. The machine city comes to town. The robot enters the auditorium. The workers’ city beneath the city is projected in places that have their own industrial ghosts, civic arguments and cultural reinventions.
For MagNorth people, that may be the point. This is not just a chance to see a famous silent film with live music. It is a chance to experience a century-old argument about labour, technology and power in rooms where those themes still have weight.
The North has no shortage of conversations about the future. Devolution, automation, culture-led regeneration, creative industries, transport, energy, health inequality, young people leaving or staying, city centres trying to reimagine themselves, seaside towns fighting lazy narratives, post-industrial places refusing to be treated as footnotes. Metropolis does not solve any of that. But art does not need to solve a problem to sharpen the way we see it.
Sometimes it just needs to turn the lights down, make the machines roar, and remind us that the future has always been political.
16 September 2026 — Lowther Pavilion, Lytham St Annes
19 September 2026 — The Tung Auditorium, Liverpool
22 September 2026 — The Fire Station, Sunderland
25 September 2026 — King’s Hall, Ilkley
8 October 2026 — Playhouse Whitley Bay
11 October 2026 — The Plaza, Stockport
Tickets and full tour information are available HERE
