Saturday Review

Bidisha and her guests actor Kerry Shale and writers Natalie Haynes and Paul Morley review the week's cultural highlights including Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan.

Serena Frome is the narrator of Ian McEwan's new novel. A Cambridge graduate recruited by MI5 in the early 70s, her first assignment beyond lowly paper-pushing involves the covert funding of anti-Communist writers. Her target is Tom Haley - an English graduate and aspiring writer working at Sussex University - but her interest in him becomes more than just professional.

Soul Sister is a musical that features the songs of Ike and Tina Turner and tells the story of the couple's tempestuous relationship on and off stage. Emi Wokoma plays the role of Tina and Chris Tummings is Ike in the production which has just opened at the Savoy Theatre in London.

The Nigerian film industry - also known as Nollywood - is still comparatively young and typified by small budgets and fairly basic production values, but director Mahmood Ali Balogun has tried to raise its standards with his family drama Tango With Me. Genevieve Nnaji and Joseph Benjamin play Lola and Uzo who seem like the perfect couple until a shocking act of violence on their wedding night darkens their lives and threatens their marriage.

Walking is an installation on the Norfolk coast by the avant garde American director and playwright Robert Wilson, or - more precisely - three installations along a three mile stretch of coast near Holkham between which visitors walk at a snail's pace dictated by 'angels' in yellow ponchos.

Danish director Birger Larsen has worked on Nordic noir hits Wallander, The Killing and Those Who Kill. Now he has come to Nottingham to shoot Robert Jones's crime drama Murder for BBC2. Karla Crome stars as Coleen - a young woman who shares a flat with her sister Erin. One night Stefan (Joe Dempsie) comes to the flat and by the end of the evening Erin has been murdered. But Coleen and Stefan's accounts of what happened are very much at odds with each other.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Bidisha and guests Dreda Say Mitchell, Maeve Kennedy and Cahal Dallat review the week's cultural events including BBC Two's new drama serial Parades End starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall and Alan Ayckbourn's new comedy Surprises which opens at Chichester Festival Theatre this week.

Ford Maddox Ford's key modernist novel Parades End, published as a series of four books between 1924 and 1928, is adapted for BBC television by Britain's foremost playwright, Sir Tom Stoppard, the first television drama he has written in almost 30 years. With a stellar cast including Benedict Cumberbatch, Rebecca Hall, Stephen Graham, Rupert Everett, Miranda Richards and Anne-Marie Duff, Parades End explores a formative period of British history - from the twilight years of the Edwardian era to the end of the First World War.

Naomi Alderman follows well trodden literary footsteps from Norman Mailer to Robert Graves in re-telling the story of Jesus Christ in her third novel The Liars' Gospel. Her narrators are Mary / Miryam, Iehuda of Qeriot / Judas, Caiaphas - the High Priest of the Temple and Bar Avo / Barrabas. Her first novel - Disobedience - won the Orange Prize for New Writing. How will her prose match up to telling one of the most well known stories in the world?

Take This Waltz stars Michelle Williams, whose previous films include My Week With Marilyn, Blue Valentine and Brokeback Mountain and is directed by Sarah Polley whose last film, Academy Award nominated Away From Her, starred Julie Christie as an older woman suffering from dementia. This film explores the age old question of what long term relationships do to love, sex and our images of ourselves.

Alan Ayckbourn explores the impact of long term relationships on love and sex in his new play - his 76th - Surprises which opens in a double bill with Absurd Person Singular at the Chichester Festival Theatre this week. Like Comic Potential he sets this play in the future in which humans have the ability to time travel and thus shape their own destiny. There are also robots, and much humour is derived from an android - Gorman - who develops the capacity for human emotion, played to great effect by Richard Stacey.

And seven years since the release of Ry Cooder's last ground breaking album - Chavez Ravine - the election of a new US President is marked by Cooder with the release of a new album - Election Special. Tracks such as Mutt Romney Blues, Guantanamo and The Wall Street Part of Town explore themes which resonate strongly in America and resurrects a genre now out of fashion - the protest song. Will we all be marching along?

Producer: Hilary Dunn.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests Billy Kay, Hannah McGill and Kathryn Hughes review the cultural highlights of the week from the Edinburgh Festival including Pixar's new animated story, Brave, an American story with a very Scottish flavour. Pixar's first film to be set entirely in the British Isles it is also the first to boast a female lead. Kelly McDonald plays fiery red head Scottish Princess Merida. She is joined by other Scottish stars, Billy Connolly as King Fergus, Robbie Coltraine as Lord Dingwall and Kevin McKidd as Lord MacGuffin - aswell as Emma Thompson and Julie Walters.

The British premiere of Morning by award winning British playwright Simon Stephens opens at the Traverse. Developed with young actors from the Junges Theater in Basel and the Lyric Young Company in London Stephens play begins as Cat prepares to go off to university, a prospect that is depressing her best friend Stephanie. Described as moving from brutality to banality, the play charts disillusion and alienation amongst urban youth.

The panel also discuss the National Theatre of Scotland's Appointment with the Wicker Man at the newly refurbished Assembly Rooms, a spoof of the 1973 cult film The Wicker Man, The Best of Edinburgh Showcase Show at the Pleasance Courtyard and Dirty Great Love Story also at the Pleasance.

NVA Speed of Light invites the audience to take part in a walking version of son et lumiere on Arthur's Seat - their advertisement for runners asked "Ever dreamed of running in a light suit as part of a choreographed mass movement on Arthur's Seat. Well this is your chance." Saturday Review joined the audience participants during the dress rehearsal, donning light sabres and suitable walking shoes to brave the rocky crags.

And a series of public art commissions including Andrew Miller's artist's pavilion in St Andrews Square, The Waiting Place, Callum Innes's Regent Bridge, Kevin Harmon's 24/7, Martin Creed's Work 1059 the Scotsman Steps, the Rose Street Film Programme and The House of Fairytales.

And Indian writer Manu Joseph's second novel "The Illicit Happiness of Other People" is set in a Madras tenement and explores the fall out of a family tragedy. It explores the pressures arising from living cheek by jowl with neighbours, as well as probing the quixotic nature of what we understand by the truth.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelists Adam Mars Jones and Lisa Appignanesi and writer Ekow Eshun review the week's cultural highlights including Seth MacFarlane's film Ted.

Mark Haddon's best-selling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has been adapted for the stage by Simon Stephens. The production at the National Theatre is directed by Marianne Elliot and stars Luke Treadaway as Christopher Boone - a 15 year old "mathematician with behavioural difficulties" (his own description). When Christopher tries to find out who killed a neighbour's dog he unearths more about his own life than he anticipated.

The Daylight Gate is Jeanette Winterson's latest book and is published by the Hammer imprint. The book is set in 17th century Lancashire and is based on events around the notorious Pendle witch trials. The central character is Alice Nutter, a free-thinking woman who finds herself drawn into a dangerous conflict with the local magistrate and a witch-finder newly arrived from London, determined to uproot witchery and popery.

Seth MacFarlane's television series American Dad and Family Guy have made him one of the best paid writers in Hollywood. His first feature film is Ted - the story of a boy called John and his teddy bear. A wish makes the bear come to life, but John (Mark Wahlberg) is still hanging out with Ted twenty-five years later and his girlfriend (Mila Kunis) is increasingly unhappy about the situation.

Water House in Walthamstow was William Morris's family home from 1848 to 1856. It became the William Morris Gallery in 1950 and has just reopened to the public after a major refurbishment. Apart from personal memorabilia and samples of Morris's work, there is also a gallery to house temporary exhibitions where Grayson Perry's Walthamstow Tapestry can be seen until 23rd September.

To celebrate its 30th birthday, Channel Four is launching a season of new comedies under the title of Funny Fortnight. This will comprise over 30 hours of programming featuring sitcoms, comedy dramas and stand up from new talent and established names. The programmes being reviewed here are three pilots: Bad Sugar, Toast of London and The Function Room.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelist Sarah Hall, playwright Laura Wade and writer David Aaronovitch review the week's cultural highlights including the Olympic opening ceremony.

The London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony - entitled Isles of Wonder - was watched by an audience of millions around the world. From bucolic idyll to a parachuting Queen, our panel assesses how good a job Danny Boyle did of directing it.

Mark Rylance returns to Globe Theatre in London for the first time since he stepped down as artistic director in 2005, to play the role of Richard III. Tim Carroll's production features an all male cast with Samuel Barnett appearing as Queen Elizabeth.

The protagonist of Ned Beauman's Booker long-listed novel The Teleportation Accident is Egon Loeser - a theatrical set designer who we first meet in 1930s Berlin. Despite the time and the place, the intensely apolitical Loeser is almost entirely oblivious to what is going on around him. His main preoccupation is the pursuit of a young woman - Adele - a quest which takes him first to Paris and then on to Los Angeles.

Michelangelo Antonioni's 1964 film Red Desert - now released in a restored version - stars Monica Vitti as Giuliana, a woman left in an agitated and anxious state following a car accident. Against the strange and alienating backdrop of the industrial outskirts of Ravenna - made stranger still by Antonioni's first use of colour film - Giuliana begins an enigmatic relationship with one of her husband's colleagues, played by Richard Harris.

As people from around the world descend on London for the Olympics, Tate Britain celebrates the ways in which foreign photographers have viewed the capital in a new exhibition - Another London: International Photographers Capture City Life 1930 - 1980. The exhibition features 177 images from the collection of 1200 photographs recently donated to the gallery by Eric and Louise Franck. It includes work by some of the biggest names in 20th century photography, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eve Arnold and Bill Brandt.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writer Kamila Shamsie, historian Dominic Sandbrook and film-maker Carol Morley review the week's cultural highlights including The Dark Knight Rises

The Dark Knight Rises is the final film in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. Christian Bale reprises his role as the caped crusader, coming out of seclusion after seven years to save Gotham from another existential threat.

Dutch author Herman Koch's novel The Dinner has already become a best-seller across Europe. The book's narrator - Paul - is having dinner at an exclusive restaurant with his brother Serge and their two wives, but the agenda behind the meal is driven by an outrage committed by their respective sons.

Nicholas Hytner's National Theatre production of Shakespeare's rarely performed play Timon of Athens stars Simon Russell Beale. Timon is a wealthy businessman whose abundant generosity wins him huge popularity. But when he falls on hard times, his erstwhile friends are not prepared to bail him out and he descends into misanthropy and destitution.

The Radio 4 series Amanda Vickery On...Men sees the social historian exploring the way in which modern masculinity has developed from various historical constructs. Each episode deals with a different era and the ideals of male behaviour that arose in it.

Tate Modern in London has just opened a new space dedicated to performance and video art. The Tanks were formerly huge oil tanks used when Bankside power station was still operational. The inaugural exhibition comprises work by Sung Hwan Kim, Lis Rhodes and Suzanne Lacy and dance performances by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Sarfraz Manzoor and his guests writers Louise Doughty and Natalie Haynes and actor Kerry Shale review the week's cultural highlights including Magic Mike.

Steven Soderbergh's latest film is set in the world of male strippers. It follows Magic Mike, a seasoned performer who mentors a novice and schools him in the fine arts of partying, picking up women and making easy money.

There's a new adaptation of the classic play A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen. It centres on a seemingly typical housewife Nora, played by Hattie Morahan, who gets into debt and becomes disillusioned and dissatisfied with her condescending husband.

The artist Julian Opie has a new exhibition of his work which employs modern media to depict new subjects in previously unexplored mediums. The exhibition includes a striking series of walking figures and a series of digitally animated landscapes, with audio, on LCD screens.

A first novel by Jonas Jonasson has become an international bestseller. The title reveals the story, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. Escaping on his hundredth birthday from an old people's home Allan begins an unlikely journey involving criminals, several murders and a suitcase full of cash. And as his escapades unfold, we also learn about his extraordinary former life.

Suburgatory is a new TV series from the US is which teenager Tessa who is forced to relocate from the city to the suburbs, after her father discovers a packet of condoms in her bedroom. She finds herself slowly trying to come to terms with her new twisted world of perfection.

Producer: Anne-Marie Cole.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writers Susan Jeffreys and Alex Preston and historian Kathryn Hughes review the week's cultural highlights.

Samantha Spiro stars as Katherina and Simon Paisley Day is Petruchio in Toby Frow's exuberant production of The Taming of the Shrew at the Globe Theatre in London.

If This Is Home is Stuart Evers' first novel and centres around Mark - a young man desperate to get out of the small Cheshire town he grew up in. He moves to the US and adopts a completely new identity, but feels impelled to return 12 years later to try to make sense of what happened just before he left.

Daniel Nettheim's film The Hunter stars Willem Dafoe as a mercenary who is hired by a bio-tech company to hunt down a Tasmanian tiger - a marsupial presumed to be extinct - in the mountains of the Australian island state.

West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin returns to television after the success of his film The Social Network with a new series - The Newsroom. Jeff Daniels plays Will McAvoy - a celebrity news anchor in trouble after an intemperate outburst. Mackenzie McHale (Emily Mortimer) is hired to produce his new show and has a strong streak of idealism - but the two have some history.

Designing 007: 50 Years of Bond Style at the Barbican Gallery in London celebrates the behind-the-scenes talent that has made the Bond films such a popular and good-looking franchise for half a century.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelist Liz Jensen, poet Paul Farley and academic and critic Maria Delgado review the week's cultural highlights including Killer Joe.

William Friedkin's film Killer Joe is set in the Texas badlands. Chris (Emile Hirsch) needs some money fast so that he can pay off some local drug dealers - the only way he can see is to have his mother killed and then collect the insurance. So he enlists the services of local policeman and freelance murderer Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey).

As part of its contribution to the Cultural Olympiad, the BBC are screening The Hollow Crown - new adaptations of the Shakespeare history plays Richard II, Henry IV pt 1 & 2 and Henry V. The directors involved are Rupert Goold, Richard Eyre and Thea Sharrock and the impressive cast includes Ben Wishaw, Rory Kinnear, Jeremy Irons, Simon Russell Beale and Tom Hiddlestone.

Leaving the Atocha Station is the debut novel by American poet Ben Lerner. It follows the experiences of Adam, a young American poet on a prestigious scholarship in Madrid, where he has gone to learn the language and, notionally at least, to research the Spanish civil war for a forthcoming work.

Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye at Tate Modern in London brings together many of the Norwegian artist's paintings but doesn't feature his most famous work The Scream. It does however include photographs and cine film taken by Munch and makes a case that his interest in early cinema had a direct impact on his paintings.

Dr Dee - Damon Albarn and Rufus Norris's music drama about the Elizabethan polymath and mystic John Dee - had its premiere at the Manchester Festival last year. Reworked and expanded it now comes to ENO in London. A series of tableaux from Dee's life it is possibly the only current stage production in London to feature live ravens.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelist Gillian Slovo and writers Sarfraz Manzoor and Maev Kennedy review the week's cultural highlights including The Last of the Haussmans

Stephen Beresford's play The Last of the Haussmans at the National Theatre in London stars Julie Walters as Judy - an aging child of the 60s whose children Libby (Helen McCrory) and Nick (Rory Kinnear) feel that her lofty ideals are no substitute for proper parenting and a substantial inheritance.

The narrator of Ancient Light by John Banville is Alexander Cleave - an actor in his sixties, remembering the affair he had with his best friend's mother fifty years ago. But it soon becomes clear that his recollection of events may not be entirely reliable. And when he is cast in a film, there are odd echoes between the role he's playing and details of his own past life.

The Russian film Silent Souls - directed by Aleksei Fedorchenko - is a low-key kind of road movie in which a husband cremates his much-loved wife with the help of his best friend. The traditions and rituals which they adhere to are those of the Merjan - the remnants of a Finnish people who settled in Russia centuries ago.

Yoko Ono: To The Light is a retrospective of the artist's work at the Serpentine Gallery in London. It includes two versions of her Cut Piece in which audience members cut the clothes from her body with scissors and Amaze - a transparent plastic maze.

Veep is Armando Ianucci's HBO comedy starring Julia Louis Dreyfus as Selena Meyer - Vice President of the United States of America. Fans of The Thick of It will recognise the same bracing style making the journey from Whitehall to Washington.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.