We are the stuff that dreams are made on,

And our little life is rounded by a sleep.

William Shakespeare: The Tempest

PROSPERO’S words are apposite, as perseverance will perceive, though these days it’s not so much that sleep rounds life as perpetually permeates it. Old habits.

That’s the problem about a cinema-related column for Valentine’s Day. Attending the 3 10pm screening – what used to be called the matinee – coincides with the siesta.

We buy VIP tickets, around £11 apiece, and in lieu of red roses extend lovers’ largesse to a strawberry Mivvi or its 21st Century equivalent. The age of romance isn’t dead, just slumbering in the one-and-ninepennies.

It was the posh new Vue cinema, part of the multi-million pound Feethams development said to be transforming Darlington’s social life. The following evening to the Odeon in Northgate, formerly the ABC and before that ask Chris Lloyd, but these days a cinematic Cinderella.

As the lady of this house was anxious to point out, it doubled in successive days the number of occasions upon which we have together been to the pictures in the previous 40 years.

The last time, they still sold Toffetts.

VUE has multiple screens, films ranging from La La Land and Train Spotting II to Sing, which appears (honest) to be about a musical koala bear which sets out to save its local cinema.

The lady says that I wouldn’t like La La Land because there’s too much singing and Train Spotting because there’s too much swearing, and is probably right on both counts. Train Spotting, in any case, appears not to have a lot to do with Sir Nigel Gresley, or even Timothy Hackworth.

So she chooses Lion, based on the true story of a little Indian lad displaced from his family and starring Kim Novak and Dev Patel, him who has the corner shop in Coronation Street.

The striking Mr Patel, it transpires, is the principal reason for her choice – at one point so excited that she spills half her strawberry Mivvi down her jumper.

Booking’s on-line, ludicrously including a 75p booking fee for each ticket. The website also includes a 25-clause “guest admission policy” covering everything from mobile phone use – for which a patron may be shown the door – to illegally copying the film, for which he could get ten years.

The lady recalls childhood days in the wild west of Wales where kids could get into the pictures for sevenpence, so long as they sat on the floor. At the Hippodrome in Shildon it wasn’t even that much, and no sitting on the floor for fear of squashing the cockroaches.

Lion’s on in Screen 1, which clearly can accommodate several hundred and which at ten past three seats just one other person. By 3 30pm, when all the interminable adverts have finished, there are two more – but they could be the manager’s aunties, or something. It’s almost a private screening.

The seats are wonderfully comfortable, the volume ridiculous. Have we stumbled into a meeting of the Darlington Hard of Hearing Club? If not a little mutton jeff at the start, punters certainly may be at the end.

The film’s a bit like a Bollywood version of The Railway Children, the denouement changed from “Daddy, my daddy” to “Hello, mum”, but still plenty of hollering and cheering at the end.

There’s not a rush to get out. What they may need is a singing koala bear.

SHILDON had three cinemas when we were kids, Bishop Auckland at least four, including the ubiquitous Essoldo. Spennymoor had the Tivoli, Ferryhill (memory suggests) the Pavilion, Richmond the Zetland, Northallerton the Lyric. Wasn’t there even a picture house with a funny name in Butterknowle?

Darlington may once have had one on every other street. Until Vue came into sight, only the Odeon survived.

“A state-of-the-art chain cinema for blockbusters” says the Odeon website, though externally it suffers in comparison to its flashy town centre rival, Vue surrounded by some of the leisure industry’s biggest players.

The Odeon’s out on a limb. On one side’s a long abandoned pub, on the other a boarded up shop with posters for “American” wrestling stuck to the remnants. “Fanatical about film,” says the cinema façade.

Aware of the competition, the Odeon charges just £3 for most tickets, an extra £1 for “premier” seats, claims to be Britain’s cheapest cinema. Last Tuesday evening they charged £11.50, no booking fee, to watch the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “live” production of The Tempest from Stratford-upon-Avon.

The Tempest may not be everyone’s bucket of popcorn. Doubtless there are those in Darlington, as elsewhere, who suppose the sprite Ariel to be a washing powder and Prospero to be the latest (and rather ingenious) rebranding of a leading high street building society.

The Odeon, in turn, perseveres. In coming months they’ll have more “live” Shakespeare, the Royal Opera House and Royal Ballet, National Theatre, too. It’s brave and commendable, though the on-line injunction to “purchase tickets to avoid disappointment” may redefine optimism.

Maybe two dozen are scattered about, Darlington for culture. You can tell the culturati because they were the sort of unisex forage caps made popular by Bob Dylan 50 years ago. You can also bet that they’re wrestling with a problem, to which shortly we shall return.

A tray of nachos with three dips costs £6, a bottle of water another £1.75. Roses might have been cheaper.

Simon Russell Beall plays Prospero, Jenny Rainsford his daughter Miranda, Mark Quartley the memorably spritely Ariel and Joe Dixon the monstrously malformed slave Caliban, who rather resembles some of the characters on the wrestling posters next door.

Most of the laughter’s been recorded in Stratford, the ringing mobile’s definitely in Darlington – where, it’s reasonable to assume, the person who breaks wind is similarly ensconced.

There’s a 20-minute interval – no drinks on a stick, no half-time oranges, no operator changing the reels. Though we’d vowed never to part, the lady insists upon staying among the premier seats while I, Ariel-like, steal across the road for a pint in Darlington Snooker Club.

It’s a brilliant production, a magical play in every sense, enhanced – not endangered – by ingenious 21st Century digital technology like Stratford’s answer to Kynren.

That highlights the audience’s problem. Though the cast can’t hear, should they applaud at the end? They don’t, which almost seems a shame: for Valentine’s Day it’s a Tempest that has blown up a storm.

And so, as they say, to bed.