Saturday Review

By BBC Radio 4Society & Culture

Saturday Review episodes

December 10, 2016 Once in a Lifetime, Birth of a Nation, Alice in Space, Mathematics at Science Museum, Walt Disney on BBC2
A revival of Once in a Lifetime, the 1930s comedy about the movie industry at the beginning of the talkies.
A new film with the title "Birth of a Nation" cannot escape the obvious associations with the 1915 DW Griffith silent film of the same name which portrayed The Ku Klux Klan in a heroic light. This production has been dogged by controversy for completely different reasons.
Alice In Space by Gillian Beer looks at Lewis Carroll's classic and resets it in the context of its time to shine a fresh reinvigorating light on the work
There's an exhibition about Mathematics at London's Science Museum, looking at how it shapes our world
BBC2 presents a two part series about Walt Disney - his life and legacy
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Meg Rosoff, Jacqueline Springer and David Benedict. The producer is Oliver Jones.
43 min
December 05, 2016 RSC's Seven Acts of Mercy, Spike Lee's Chi-raq, Robert Rauschenberg, Poets Ben Lerner and Rachael Boast, This Is Us
The Royal Shakespeare Company presents Anders Lustgarten's new play Seven Acts of Mercy; drawing connections between Caravaggio and modern Liverpool
Spike Lee's latest film Chi-raq retells the classic Greek tale of Lysistrata imagining a sex strike organised by the women of Chicago in order to get their menfolk to renounce violence.
American painter, sculptor, printmaker, photographer and performance artist Robert Rauschenberg is the subject of a retrospective at Tate Modern; the first since his death in 2008
Two books of poetry, one American, one British - Ben Lerner's No Art and Rachael Boast's Void Studies
This Is Us has been enormously successful in the USA and has now been bought by Channel 4 - will it be embraced by British viewers?
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Tiffany Jenkins, Damian Barr and Frances Stonor Saunders. The producer is Oliver Jones.
42 min
November 26, 2016 The Children, The Wailing, Rillington Place, Penelope Lively, Victor Pasmore
Young British playwright Lucy Kirkwood's latest play The Children opens at London's Royal Court Theatre: three old friends discussing the future after an unnamed disaster
Korean horror drama film The Wailing has been gaining a lot of international attention - combining a ghost story and zombies and a police drama
Tim Roth plays the serial murderer John Christie in BBC TV's Rillington Place. A three part series, it looks at the story from the points of view of Christie, his wife and the lodger who was wrongly hanged for the murders.
Penelope Lively's latest collection of short stories is called "Purple Swamp Hen"
There's a new exhibition in Nottingham of the work of the late Victor Pasmore, British abstract artist and educator
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Blake Morrison, Barb Jungr and Andrea Rose. The producer is Oliver Jones.
42 min
November 19, 2016 RSC's Tempest, Indignation, Divines, Zadie Smith, Design Museum
The RSC's production latest Tempest features Simon Russell Beale as Prospero and has a holographic Ariel. Does cutting edge technology sit comfortably inside Shakespeare's play which is so full of magic?
Philip Roth's novel Indignation, set in 1950's America is now a film. Dealing with social mores, the desire to rebel and how it affects the rebel
Zadie Smith's latest novel Swing Time is a story of the long and complicated friendship between two girls whose lives diverge.
Divines is a Cannes Award winning French film set in the banlieue where crime seems the only way out of the social structure
The Design Museum has reopened at a new site in Kensington in London - formerly The Commonwealth Institute, it has cost £38m to adapt - does it impress?
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Tom Holland, Sarah Crompton and Louise Jury. The producer is Oliver Jones.
43 min
November 12, 2016 Glenda Jackson as King Lear, The Innocents, Linda Grant, Elton John's photographs in Radical Eye, Close to the Enemy
Glenda Jackson returns to the stage after 25 years as an MP to play the title role in King Lear at London's Old Vic Theatre. Is she a frail 80 year old or a commanding presence?
French/Polish film The Innocents is based on a true story about a convent in post-war Poland where the nuns were raped by Soviet soldiers.
Linda Grant's latest novel The Dark Circle tells the story of Lenny and Miriam, two east-enders convalescing in a TB sanatorium in 1940s Kent
The Radical Eye, Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection is the new exhibition at London's Tate Modern. Pinner's favourite son has been purchasing work by the world's leading photographers for more than 2 decades and created one of the leading private collections in the world.
Stephen Poliakoff's Close to the Enemy on BBC TV is set in London immediately after WWII as a special British Army unit tries to turn former Nazi scientists to work for 'us' now
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Rosie Boycott, Melissa Harrison and Ryan Gilbey. The producer is Oliver Jones.
42 min
November 05, 2016 Nocturnal Animals, Dead Funny, BBC's Black and British, Naomi Alderman, Emma Hamilton: seduction and celebrity
Tom Ford's new thriller film Nocturnal Animals stars Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal
A revival of terry Johnson's play Dead Funny opens at London's Vaudeville Theatre; does it live up to its name?
David Olusoga presents BBC TV's Black and British part of a season of programmes under that title
Naomi Alderman's novel The Power imagines a world in which women can conjure electrical charges from their hands - how does it change the gender power balance?
Emma Hamilton - Seduction and Celebrity is a new exhibition in Greenwich looking at the life and career.
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Rowan Pelling, Christopher Frayling and Helen Lewis. The producer is Oliver Jones.
42 min
October 29, 2016 Amadeus, Lo and Behold, A Horse Walks Into A Bar, Paul Nash, The Moonstone
There's a revival of Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus at London's National Theatre. It's the story of Mozart's supposed rivalry with fellow composer Salieri and it has a live orchestra on stage accompanying and acting in the play
Werner Herzog's latest film Lo and Behold considers the history and future, the successes and failures of the world wide web
Israeli author David Grossman's novel A Horse Walks Into A Bar is a story about an edgy stand-up comedian who's playing strange confessional games with his audience
Tate Britain has an exhibition of the work of Paul Nash, from his times as a war artist in both world wars and his surrealist paintings to his less well known assemblages
The BBC's new period drama has been in the planning stages for a long time; The Moonstone is based on Wilkie Collins' novel, acknowledged as the first and greatest of English Detective novels.
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Abigail Morris, Rajan Datar and Maev Kennedy. The producer is Oliver Jones.
42 min
October 22, 2016 David Hare, Ken Loach, The Young Pope, Sebastian Barry, Yves Klein
David Hare's latest play The Red Barn is an adaptation of a Georges Simenon thriller now at London's National Theatre
Ken Loach's new film I Daniel Blake is a typically hard-hitting reflection on the political state of modern Britain. It won this year's Palme d'Or, will it win over the reviewers?
The Young Pope is a new series from Sky Atlantic starring Jude Law as the first American pontiff; new, controversial and unconventional Pope Pius XIII (born Lenny Belardo)
Award-winning Irish novelist Sebastian Barry's newest work Days Without End is set in 1850s America following soldiers fighting in the Indian Wars and then in the Civil War.
We visit the Yves Klein retrospective at Tate Liverpool. He was a leading member of the Nouveau Realisme movement (and invented his own shade of blue) before dying at the age of 34
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Shahidha Bari, Demetrios Matheou and Polly Samson.
42 min
October 15, 2016 One Night in Miami, The Mountaintop, Black Mirror, Ali Smith, Beyond Caravaggio
We're looking at two plays about black America this week: Kemp Powers' One Night In Miami imagines a meeting in 1964 between boxer Cassius Clay, activist Malcolm X, singer Sam Cooke & American Football star Jim Brown as they decide how they can each change the world. Katori Hall's The Mountaintop is set 4 year's later and imagines Rev Martin Luther King's last night alive, in a hotel room in Memphis
Charlie Brooker's distopian TV show Black Mirror was a huge success when it began on Channel 4. The new series has moved on to Netflix - a different scale of budget and a different audience. Can it have the same effect?
Ali Smith's Autumn is the first in a quartet of seasonal novels. It imagines a contemporary Britain struggling to deal with its identity
London's National Gallery's Beyond Caravaggio exhibition explores the influence of Caravaggio on the art of his contemporaries and followers.
Razia Iqbal's guests Emma Dabiri, Ekow Eshun and Hardeep Singh Kohli. The producer is Oliver Jones.
42 min
October 08, 2016 The Girl on The Train, Travesties, Picasso Portraits, Nicotine, Divorce
The Girl on The Train starring British actress Emily Blunt is based on Paula Hawkins's best selling thriller which has sold more than 10 million copies world wide. The film is set in New York, rather than London, and explores the voyeuristic obsessions of its alcoholic central character as she observes her former neighbourhood from a train window on her daily commute.
Tom Stoppard wrote Travesties in 1974, inspired by the true story of James Joyce's involvement in a production of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest in Zurich in 1917. A revival at the Menier Chocolate Factory is directed by Patrick Marber and stars Tom Hollander as Henry Carr the British consular official who played Algernon and fell out with Joyce during the production.
A major exhibition of portraits by Pablo Picasso opens at the National Portrait Gallery, with over 80 portraits by the artist in all media including the Cubist portrait from 1910 of the German art dealer and early champion of Picasso's work Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.
In Nicotine by Nell Zing - whose work is admired by Jonathan Franzen - the author sets her third novel in a house in New Jersey inhabited by a group of anarchist smokers, united in defense of their right to smoke. When Penny Baker inherits the house from her father she becomes enmeshed in the political fervor and commitment of her fellow squatters.
And in Divorce, a new Sky Atlantic TV drama written by Sharon Horgan, Sarah Jessica Parker stars as Frances, a woman who suddenly begins to reassess her life and her marriage, and finds that making a clean break and a fresh start is harder than she thought.
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Kamila Shamsie, Tim Lott and Charlotte Mullins. The producer was Hilary Dunn.
42 min