Making a noise about silent classics

Accompanied by improvised piano music, Doncaster’s Cast Theatre will screen movies by stars from yesteryear as part of the Yorkshire Silent Film Festival which takes place at 13 venues.

On Wednesday (July 6), Cast will screen a triple bill of silent film comedy from two of cinema’s greatest clowns.

Starting at 7pm, Buster Keaton will appear in One Week, dating from 1920, and The Boat (1921), and Charlie Chaplin appears in The Adventurer (1917). 

On Thursday (July 7) at 2pm, Harold Lloyd stars in Safety Last! (1923) and later that day at 7pm there will be a feature-length screening of one of Hollywood’s silent masterpieces, The Phantom of the Opera (1925), starring Lon Chaney Senior.

Producer and West End musical director Jonathan Best, who will be providing accompaniment for the comedies at Cast, said: “Yorkshire has a special importance in the history of film. The first moving images were shot in Leeds and Holmfirth was the home of one of the earliest British film makers, James Bamforth. Yorkshire is one of the places in which silent cinema was born.”

Tickets for the Yorkshire Silent Film Festival at Cast cost £12 for all three screenings, or £5 individually, and are available on 01302 303959 or by visiting castindoncaster.com.