Saturday Review

By BBC Radio 4Society & Culture

Saturday Review episodes

May 23, 2015 Owen Sheers, Ninagawa's Hamlet, Home in Manchester, The New Girlfriend, Armada on BBC One
Owen Sheers' novel I Saw A Man deals with loss, grief, guilt and attempted redemption
Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa has directed Hamlet 8 times. His latest production is playing at The Barbican in London - how well does this 17th Century English play transfer to a setting in 19th Century Japan?
Manchester has a brand new arts centre: Home. What will it add to to Manchester's vibrant arts scene?
Francois Ozon's film The New Girlfriend is based on a Ruth Rendell novel. How does the cross-dressing of the main character - a young widower - affect his friends, male and female?
Dan Snow presents Armada, 12 Days To Save England on BBC2; taking a fresh modern look at the great Elizabethan sea battle - the reasons as well as the results.
42 min
May 16, 2015 Mad Max, Cornelia Parker, Pirates of Penzance, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, TC Boyle
Artist Cornelia Parker's contribution to The British Library's Magna Carta octocentennial exhibition is an embroidery interpretation of the Wikipedia page for this cornerstone of the British constitution. What does it add to the commemorations?
There's a new Mad Max film, "Fury Road", with Tom Hardy replacing Mel Gibson in the title role - it's two hours of more-or-less non-stop action and taken decades to reach the screen; is it worth the wait?
Film director Mike Leigh is a big fan of the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. He has been working with English National Opera on a staging of The Pirates of Penzance -how does his improvisational working style fit with the formatted world of opera?
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell was Susanna Clarke's 800 page novel of magic in 19th Century England. It's been turned into a 7-part TV series by the BBC.
American novelist TC Boyle's newest work is The Harder They Come, about gun control and mental illness in the USA.
42 min
May 09, 2015 The Vote, The Crow Eaters, Girlhood, Brighton Festival, Grace and Frankie
The Vote is a comedy set in a polling station on election night, performed live at the Donmar Warehouse and simultaneously broadcast on More4. Starring Mark Gatiss, Judi Dench, Catherine Tate and nearly 40 more actors, can it have a life after we announce our verdict?
Bapsi Sidhwa's novel The Crow Eaters is a classic of Pakistani writing; a darkly humorous tale of a family in Lahore in the early 1900s. fans include Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Fatima Bhutto. What will our panel make of it?
The French film Girlhood tells the story of the lives of a group of young black Parisiennes; a group notably underrepresented in French cinema. Does this film do something original with the idea?
We look at a couple of works at this year's Brighton Festival on an avian theme: Dawn Chorus, humans reproducing birdsong and Murmuration looking at birdwatching and spying
Grace and Frankie is a new comedy series starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin as two septuagenarians who are surprised when their husbands announce that they're gay and intend to marry each other.
Image: Mark Gatiss as Steven Crosswell in The Vote, Donmar Warehouse
Photo Credit: Johan Persson.
42 min
May 02, 2015 Everyman, Far from the Madding Crowd, Empire, Anne Enright, Christopher Williams
Carol Ann Duffy has adapted the 16th century morality play Everyman for London's National Theatre, with Chiwetel Ejiofor in the title role There's a new film version of Far From The Madding Crowd, this time with Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba Everdene - is it fair to compare it with the 1969 version?
Empire is a TV phenomenon in the US; a tale of power and intrigue at a hip hop record label - like a black Dynasty crossed with King Lear - it has drawn unprecedented audiences and now it's come to the UK
Anne Enright''s novel The Green Road tells the individual stories of a geographically-dispersed Irish family who are brought back together for a family gathering with all the pressure that unavoidably ensues
A retrospective exhibition of Christopher Williams photography at The Whitechapel Gallery in London looks at the unexpected beauty and cultural resonance of commercial, industrial and instructional photography.
42 min
April 25, 2015 Toni Morrison, Ah Wilderness!, Indigenous Australians, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch, Storyville: Himmler
Toni Morrison's new novel, God Help The Child explores issues including skin colour prejudice, child abuse and justice.
Eugene O'Neill's 1933 play Ah Wilderness! is one of his less-performed works. He described it as a folk comedy, is it still funny today?
The British Museum exhibition, Indigenous Australians: Enduring Civilisation, looks at 60 millennia of Aboriginal life and art
A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence is the peculiar Lion d'Or winning film from Sweden - is it funny? unnerving? odd? magnificent?
BBC 4's Storyville series - bringing the best foreign documentaries to a British TV audience - has been going for 10 years. We review the latest: "Himmler, The Decent One", which looks at the life of Hitler's deputy through his private correspondence.
42 min
April 18, 2015 Carmen Disruption, Home From Home, Caryl Phillips, Sonia Delaunay
Carmen Disruption is Simon Stephens' radical reworking of Bizet's opera, exploring the place where the actor becomes the character they're playing
Home From Home, a 4 hour long cinematic prequel to the 53 hour long TV series Heimat, tells the tale of a fictional rural German village from the 1840s to the 1990s.
Caryl Phillips' latest novel The Lost Child reimagines Wuthering Heights through several interweaving narratives.
An exhibition of the work of Sonia Delaunay at Tate Modern is designed as a radical reassessment of her importance as an artist, showcasing her originality and creativity across the twentieth Century.
43 min
April 11, 2015 Eric Ravilious, Force Majeure, Ice Rink on the Estate, After Electra, Jesse Armstrong
Eric Ravilious was one of the finest watercolourists that the UK has ever produced. Born in 1903, he died in 1942 while on duty as an official war artist. Does a new exhibition of his work reveal his genius?
In Swedish film 'Force Majeure', an avalanche during a family skiing holiday causes no physical damage but opens fissures in the happy family structure
Olympic gold medallists Torvill & Dean have a new TV series: 'Ice Rink On The Estate'. They attempt to turn a group of kids from a deprived Nottingham housing estate are turned into an ice dance troupe.
There are very few roles for older actresses, but in April de Angelis' play 'After Electra', the main character is 81 years.
The co-writer of Peep Show, Jesse Armstrong has written his debut novel - Can a successful witty TV writer easily make the transfer?
42 min
April 04, 2015 Death of a Salesman, While We're Young, Alfred Hitchcock, Frames in Focus, Sex and the Church
Arthur Miller's Pullitzer prize winning 1949 play, Death of a Salesman, set in Brooklyn in New York, is one of the greatest American tragedies ever written. In a production to celebrate the centenary of Miller's birth at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford on Avon, Artistic Director Greg Doran directs Anthony Sher as Willy Loman, Harriet Walter as his wife Linda and Alex Hassel as their son Biff. How well does this production portray the darkness that lies at the heart of the American dream?
Oscar nominated for The Squid and the Whale, "While We're Young" is Noah Baumbach's 8th feature film, and his second collaboration with star Ben Stiller. A comedy about the generational divide in a technologically driven age - what new insights does it provide on the perennial conflict between age and youth?
Award winning novelist, biographer and poet Peter Ackroyd's turns his attention to Alfred Hitchcock in a new biography which details the director's stormy, controlling relationships with his leading ladies, as well the painstaking way in which he mastered his cinematic craft manifest in such cinema classics as Notorious, Rear Window, Psycho and The Birds. What new light can the "Master of Biography" shed upon the "Master of Suspense?"
When you go to see an exhibition at the National Gallery in London you expect to see paintings. However in Frames in Focus: Sansovino Frames it is the frames themselves that are the stars of the show - one of the first times ever a UK gallery has created an exhibition (almost) purely from frames alone. What does this exhibition reveal about the art of the picture frame?
And a new BBC 2 television series, Sex and The Church, explores the complex question of the church's attitude towards sex from the birth of Jesus to the present day, presented by Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch.
42 min
March 28, 2015 Rules for Living, Blind, Richard III, Acts of the Assassins, Body in Ancient Greek Art
Sam Holcroft's new play, Rules For Living, at The National's Dorfman Theatre shows a family full of traits and ticks that define their relationships. How do we react when we're under pressure with our nearest and dearest?
The Norwegian film Blind plays around with perception. The lead character loses her sight and has to reassess her relationship with the world and especially those around her.
We've been watching Channel 4's coverage of the re-internment of Richard III. How fascinating can many hours of television devoted to the burying of a 500 year old corpse be?
The Acts of the Assassins by Richard Beard could be boiled down to a police procedural about the deaths of Christ's apostles, but it is set simultaneously in the 1st and 21st centuries
Defining Beauty; The Body in Ancient Greek Art at The British Museum looks at the development and influence of Greek sculpture, drawing on their permanent collection and many rarely-loaned works from overseas
Tom Sutcliffe's guests are Kamila Shamsie, Emma Woolf and Nicholas Lezard. The producer is Oliver Jones.
42 min
March 21, 2015 Richard Diebenkorn, Mommy, Frozen, The Shore, Coalition
The first major retrospective of Richard Diebenkorn's work for 25 years opens at London's Royal Academy. Derided by some for making abstract art popular, does this new show, which includes his figurative paintings too, restore his reputation as a serious artist?
A new Channel 4 drama "Coalition" dramatises the negotiations which took place immediately after the last general election and is based on first hand research by writer James Graham, whose past work includes Privacy, Tory Boyz and the Olivier-nominated This House. With Mark Gatiss as Peter Mandelson, how much of a behind the scenes insight does Coalition give us about this historic moment in British politics? And how well does it work as a drama?
A revival of Bryony Lavery's award winning play Frozen opens at the Park Theatre in London tells the story of the disappearance of a 10-year-old girl, Rhona, through three protagonists: the girl's killer, her mother and a New York psychiatrist researching why people commit such crimes. How does Frozen negotiate such a controversial and complex subject as child killers?
Set on a collection of islands off the coast of Virginia, Bailey longlisted debut novel "The Shore" by Sara Taylor interweaves stories that trace different generations of the same family over the course of 150 years.
In "Mommy" 25 year old Canadian director Xavier Dolan returns to the theme of mothers and sons, first explored in his debut feature "I Killed My Mother." Casting Anne Dorval as a strong, independent woman overwhelmed with the task of caring for a teenage tyrant, how does he portray the pressures inflicted by the chaotic, testosterone fuelled madness of a 15 year old boy.
42 min