Saturday Review

15/10/2011


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Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writers Lisa Appignanesi and David Benedict and Canon Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral Giles Fraser review the week's cultural highlights including Everything Must Go.

Will Ferrell stars in Dan Rush's film Everything Must Go as a man pitched with shocking suddenness from middle-class prosperity to homelessness. He is reduced to living on his front lawn after his wife throws all his possessions out into the yard and changes the locks. It's very loosely based on the Raymond Carver short story Why Don''t You Dance?

In 1990 Claire Tomalin published The Invisible Woman - a book about the 19th century actress Nelly Ternan who had a secret relationship with Charles Dickens when he was in his 40s and at the height of his fame. She has now written a biography of the writer himself - Charles Dickens: A Life - a portrait of a frenetically busy man who revealed many contradictions in his writing, his good works, his attitude to women and his treatment of his family.

When Edward Bond's play Saved was first performed at the Royal Court in 1965, it shocked audiences with its frank portrayal of disaffected youth and particularly with a scene in which a group of bored young men stone a baby to death. Sean Holmes directs the first professional production of the play in nearly 30 years at the Lyric Hammersmith.

Ronan Bennett spent two years interviewing drug dealers and gang members in East London to glean material for Top Boys - a four part drama that he's written for Channel 4. One of the drama's central strands concerns Dushane (Ashley Walters) - a middle-ranking member of a drugs gang who has his sights set on bigger things.

Film by Tacita Dean is the latest of the Unilever series of installations in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. In an elegy to the virtually extinct medium of analogue film - Dean has used one end of the hall as a vast vertical screen on which to project an 11 minute loop of images.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

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