Saturday Review

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelists Linda Grant and Adam Mars Jones and writer Bidisha review the week's cultural highlights including David Cronenberg's film Cosmopolis.

GATZ is Elevator Repair Service's stage adaptation of The Great Gatsby in which every word of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel is read and acted by the occupants of a drab American office. Scott Shepherd plays a man who, arriving at his desk and finding his computer unresponsive, picks up a paperback copy of the book and starts reading it aloud.

David Cronenberg's film Cosmopolis is an adaptation of Don DeLillo's 2003 novel and stars Robert Pattinson as Eric Packer - a billionaire financial whiz-kid who is travelling across Manhattan to get a haircut in the stretch limo he uses as an office. However, a presidential visit to the city, a rapper's funeral and a threat to Packer's life mean that the journey is far from straightforward.

Indelible Ink by Australian author Fiona McGregor is a novel about Marie King - a 59 year old divorcee facing large changes in her life, including having to sell her beautiful Sydney Harbour home and the garden she has spent years creating. One afternoon, on a drunken impulse, she gets a tattoo and - despite the disapproval of her three children - she goes on to have her skin covered in more and more elaborate designs.

Invisible: Art about the Unseen 1957 - 2012 at the Hayward Gallery in London explores the rich history of intangible art including film of Yves Klein showing the viewer around the blank walls of an empty gallery, Andy Warhol's Invisible Sculpture (comprising a plinth that he once stood next to) and Air by Teresa Margolles - a space cooled by two air-conditioners filled with water previously used to wash murder victims in a Mexican morgue.

Dominic Savage's new drama series for BBC1 - True Love - consists of five short films, all of them set in Margate and all of them created by a process of improvisation. Among the actors creating their own dialogue are David Tennant, Ashley Walters, Billie Piper and David Morrissey.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelists Dreda Say Mitchell and Deborah Moggach and writer Paul Morley review the week's cultural highlights including Ben Drew's film iLL Manors.

Ben Drew (a.k.a rapper Plan B) makes his directorial debut with the film iLL Manors. Ed and Aaron are small time East London drug dealers and the film weaves various interlocking narratives around them and others eking out a hand-to-mouth existence in a dangerous and morally hazy environment.

Martin Amis's novel Lionel Asbo is also set on a London estate where deprivation and criminality are rife. Lionel is the pitbull-owning uncle of Des - a teenager with higher aspirations. But while Des attempts to break free via education, Lionel moves into the precarious world of instant celebrity and notoriety after a lottery win.

Gregory Doran's production of Julius Caesar at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford relocates the action to a modern African state. Jeffery Kissoon is Caesar with Paterson Joseph as Brutus and Ray Fearon as Mark Anthony.

Following in the footsteps of Kevin Macdonald's crowd-sourced film A Life in a Day, Morgan Matthews has taken 750 hours of footage shot by members of the public all round the UK on November 12th last year and edited it down to make Britain in a Day for BBC2.

Photoworks at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London is the first UK solo show by American artist Nancy Holt. Holt is a pioneering artist in the field of land art and site specific work and this exhibition comprises landscape photographs of the American West and of interventions which she made in the landscape over the course of five decades.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writers Malorie Blackman and Giles Fraser and musician Pat Kane review the week's cultural highlights including Ridley Scott's film Prometheus and Christopher Eccleston's performance as Creon in Antigone at the National Theatre.

It is over thiry years since Ridley Scott all but invented the science fiction film genre, first with Alien and then with Blade Runner. Prometheus is described as a prequel to Alien, the film which itself has spawned so many sequels. Starring Girl With The Dragon Tatoo star Noomi Rapace along with Michael Fassbender and British actor Idris Elba - does the film live up to the hype? And does the vastly superior digital technology three decades on aid or detract from the creation of monster aliens and forbidding planets?

Christopher Eccleston is Creon and Jodi Whittaker is Antigone in a new production of Sophocles's Antigone at the National's Olivier Theatre translated into modern idiom by Don Taylor. Directed by up and coming director Polly Findlay and set in an Eastern European type bunker, how does a play which explores the conflict between the individual and the state resonate in 21st century Britain?

Pulitzer Prize winning author Richard Ford's new novel Canada explores the adolescent trauma of 15 year old Del Parsons whose parents rob a bank. This extraordinary event is recounted in great detail 50 odd years later by Del himself. The novel explores the themes of memory and survival, issues that lie at the heart of American identity.

Turner Prize winning artist Grayson Perry brings us a new three-part series All In The Best Possible Taste on Channel 4 in which he goes on safari through the taste tribes of Britain, not just to observe our taste, but to tell us in an artwork what it means. The work he'll be creating is a series of six imposing tapestries called 'The Vanity of Small Differences' - his personal but panoramic take on the taste of 21st century Britain, from Sunderland to Tunbridge Wells to the Cotswolds.

And the Heatherwick Studio: Designing the Extraordinary at the V&A is the first solo exhibition of this polymath designer / architect / sculptor whose creations range from the new London Routemaster Bus to the Zip Up Bag to the controversial B for a Bang star burst sculpture in Manchester

Producer: Hilary Dunn.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelists Lionel Shriver and Andrew O' Hagan and theatre writer David Benedict review the week's cultural highlights including Moonrise Kingdom.

Wes Anderson's film Moonrise Kingdom is set on a remote New England island and features two precocious 12 year olds - Sam and Suzy (Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward) - who run away from scout camp and home respectively to be with each other. The film also stars Bill Murray and Frances McDormand as Suzy's parents, Bruce Willis as the island's police chief and Edward Norton as the scout leader.

The Deadman's Pedal - like most of Alan Warner's novels - is set in Oban on the west coast of Scotland. It's 1973 and 15 year old Simon Crimmons has broken up from school for the summer and doesn't intend to go back. Over the course of the next year he loses his virginity, gets a job as a trainee train driver and meets the mysteriously bohemian son and daughter of the local laird.

Right-wing think tank The New Culture Forum has published Igor Toronyi-Lalic's report What's That Thing? which suggests that the recent proliferation of public art in the UK and the way in which it is commissioned has resulted in many mediocre pieces cluttering up the built environment. The solutions that Toronyi-Lalic puts forward include reducing the amount of public art that is commissioned and decommissioning the art that has demonstrably failed.

Matthew Dunster's play Children's Children, which has opened at the Almeida Theatre in London, focuses on the changing fortunes of TV star Michael Stewart (Darrell D'Silva) and his old actor friends Gordon (Trevor Fox) and Sally (Sally Rogers). Michael's fame and fortune come to an abrupt end shortly after he lends Gordon a substantial sum of money.

Universe of Sound is an installation at the Science Museum in London which allows visitors to wander around the members of the Philharmonia Orchestra - conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen - while they perform The Planets by Holst. The different sections of the orchestra are projected onto screens in separate areas where live musicians also periodically play along. There is also the opportunity to conduct the orchestra in interactive booths.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writer James Runcie, director of the Serpentine Gallery Julia Peyton-Jones and comedian David Schneider review the week's cultural highlights including the play The Sunshine Boys.

The Sunshine Boys, a play which starts Danny DeVito and Richard Griffiths, features a former Vaudevillian double act who are reunited for a television comedy special, after not speaking to each other for years. Their bitter rivalry is reignited in this comedic battle of two colossal egos, each unwilling to realise he relies on the other.

Emily Perkins' novel The Forrests charts the life of Dorothy Forrest; one of many siblings of an American family living in Auckland who are barely tethered to reality. Dorothy moves through communes, love, marriage, motherhood, revelation, death and joy through Perkins' observant hand.

The Photographers' Gallery's refurbished venue opens in London with colour images from respected Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky's project 'Oil' for which he has travelled the world, documenting the effect of the extraction, refinement, transportation and use of oil on our lives.

Sacha Baron Cohen's latest film The Dictator tells the satirical tale of an oppressive, democracy-hating dictator and a goatherder (both played by Cohen) whose misadventures in America lead to a series of outrageous culture clashes.

Hit and Miss, created by Paul Abbott, the Bafta-winning writer behind State of Play and Shameless, is a television series with an extraordinary premise. Chloe Sevigny plays Mia, a preoperative male-to-female transsexual contract killer. She is also, she discovers to her shock, a father - a dying girlfriend has nominated Mia as guardian of the boy and his three half-siblings.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writers Miranda Sawyer and Ekow Eshun and historian Kathryn Hughes review the week's cultural highlights including Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Bring Up The Bodies is the sequel to Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize winning historical novel Wolf Hall. It is 1535 and Thomas Cromwell is Henry VIII's chief minister, trying to serve the king's interests following the break with Rome.

The Rest Is Silence is dreamthinkspeak's deconstruction of Hamlet, performed in a warehouse in Shoreham-by-Sea as part of the Brighton Festival. Directed by Tristan Sharps, the action takes place behind perspex screens which surround the audience on all four sides.

Tim Burton has joined forces with Johnny Depp again for Dark Shadows. The film is based on a popular US television series which ran from 1966 to 1971. Turned into a vampire and imprisoned in a locked coffin by a jealous witch in the 18th century, Barnabas Collins is finally released in 1972 and returns to his ancestral mansion in a New England fishing town to rebuild the family's fortunes.

Still with Brighton, Sea of Voices is an interactive walk along the Brighton seafront devised by Invisible Flock as part of the Brighton Festival. And artist David Batchelor has produced a special commission for the Festival - Brighton Palermo Remix - an installation in an unmodernised Regency townhouse. He is also showing some of his other work in the basement of an adjoining property and another piece - Skip - in the middle of Bartholomew Square.

In Arts Troubleshooter on BBC2, presenter Michael Lynch tries to guide cash-strapped arts organisations to a more secure future. In the first part he visits Northern Ballet in Leeds just after they find out that their Arts Council grant is to be cut by 15%.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests poet Cahal Dallat, anthropologist Kit Davis and academic and critic John Mullan review the week's cultural highlights.

The three acts of Mike Bartlett's play Love, Love, Love at the Royal Court in London are set in 1967, 1990 and 2011 respectively. The action follows Kenneth (Ben Miles) and Sandra (Victoria Hamilton) from when they first meet through their subsequent life together (and apart).

The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber is a verse novel which adds a twist to the life of Elizabethan poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe tells his story, from his days at Cambridge when he was recruited as a spy, but his death in a tavern brawl isn't as fatal as some might think...

Juan of the Dead is Cuba's first zombie film. Writer and director Alejandro Brugues uses the genre to make some points about the anti-Americanism of the Cuban government and the resourcefulness and stoicism of the Cuban people.

The Israeli television drama Prisoners of War (Hatufim) provided the inspiration for the US series Homeland. Two Israeli soldiers have been returned after 17 years in captivity and face the challenge of fitting back into a world which has changed enormously.

Bauhaus: Art As Life at the Barbican is the largest exhibition covering this influential German art movement to be staged in the UK for over 40 years.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Sarfraz Manzoor and his guests Lisa Appignanesi, Kevin Jackson and Natalie Haynes review the week's cultural highlights.

In his film Avengers Assemble Joss Whedon brings together Marvel action heroes Iron Man, Thor, The Hulk, Captain America, Hawkeye and the Black Widow as they battle to stop Loki from taking over the Earth with his alien army.

Michele Roberts' novel Ignorance revolves around two girls - Jeanne and Marie-Angele - who are schoolfriends in pre-war France but whose relationship and loyalties change as the Germans invade and the differences in their backgrounds becomes more significant.

Making Noise Quietly is a series of three short plays by Robert Holman which has been revived at the Donmar Warehouse in London by Peter Gill. Each play features characters whose lives are affected in one way or another by war.

To coincide with the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich has put on an exhibition - Royal River: Power, Pageantry and the Thames - curated by David Starkey. The exhibition aims to show how this waterway has been used as a stage to celebrate significant moments in the nation's life over the past five centuries.

The Wind in the Willows with Griff Rhys Jones is an ITV1 documentary which looks at what inspired Kenneth Grahame to write this much-loved children's classic.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writer Susan Jeffreys, literary critic John Carey and actor Kerry Shale review the cultural highlights of the week.

Lasse Halstrom's film Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is based on Paul Torday's bestselling novel. Ewan McGregor stars as an introverted government scientist who is approached by a Yemeni sheikh's representative (Emily Blunt) to fulfil her client's desire to introduce salmon fishing to his homeland.

Skios by Michael Frayn is a farce which revolves around mistaken identity. Dr Norman Wilfred is an expert in scientometrics who is flying to a Greek island to give a keynote speech to a private foundation based there. Also heading to the island is Oliver Fox, a feckless young man who has a strong tendency to act on impulse, regardless of the consequences. Both are in for some surprises.

Enda Walsh's play Misterman at the National Theatre in London stars Cillian Murphy as Thomas Magill. Although other characters appear on tape, Magill is the only one who appears on stage - an unhinged outsider, holed up in a vast, unused industrial building, replaying the events of a fateful day in the small town of Inishfree.

In The King and the Playwright: A Jacobean History on BBC4, American scholar James Shapiro examines the later period in Shakepeare's career, following the accession of James VI and I to the English throne. Shapiro argues that the political negotiations and theological debates that the playwright witnessed as a member of James's court fed directly into his later plays.

Ron Mueck's work is instantly recognisable - meticulously realistic figures made out of silicone, sometimes much larger and sometimes smaller than life. His latest exhibition - at Hauser & Wirth in London - showcases four new sculptures, including a human sized dead chicken hanging upside down from the ceiling. At the same gallery there is also an exhibition by Andy Hope - Medley Tour London. Hope revisits his earlier works in paintings he calls X Medleys, featuring characters including Batman and Beavis and Butthead.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests, playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker, novelist Kamila Shamsie, and writer and columnist David Aaronovitch review the week's cultural highlights.

David Suchet and Laurie Metcalf star in Anthony Page's production of Long Day's Journey Into Night at the Apollo Theatre in London. Eugene O'Neill described it as a play of "old sorrow, written tears and blood" and the family in this heavily autobiographical work are teetering on the verge of collapse due to various addictions and historical resentments.

Cabin in the Woods - written by Joss Whedon and directed by Drew Goddard - is a knowing horror film which sets out to subvert the well-worn tropes of the teen slasher movie genre. Five kids head off in a camper van to spend a weekend in a cabin in the woods...

Toni Morrison's latest novel - Home - tells the story of Frank Money, a damaged veteran of the Korean War who returns from fighting for his country to face the ubiquitous racism of 1950s America. Struggling with post traumatic stress, he sets out to rescue his sister and bring her back to the Georgia town which holds so many bitter memories for him.

Hans-Peter Feldman describes himself as a collector and his exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London contains many examples of the sets of objects that he has amassed, including colour postcards of the Eiffel Tower and photographs of women's knees cut out of magazines. One of his more recent works displays the contents of five women's handbags in glass cases.

Starlings is a new comedy drama series on Sky1, written by and starring Matt King and Steve Edge. The Starling family live in an overcrowded, multi-generational house just outside Matlock in Derbyshire and the first episode sees the arrival of two more family members.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.