Saturday Review

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests Deborah Bull from King's Cultural Institute, writer Adam Mars Jones and BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall review the week's cultural highlights.

Chichester Festival Theatre's 50th anniversary season kicks off with Jeremy Herrin's production of Uncle Vanya. Using Michael Frayn's translation of Chekhov's text it stars Roger Allam as Vanya in a cast which also includes Dervla Kirwan, Timothy West and Maggie Steed.

Pure is Timothy Mo's first novel for 12 years. Its main narrator is Snooky - a Bangkok ladyboy whose life as a hedonistic film reviewer is rudely interrupted when he is blackmailed by the authorities into spying on a cell of would-be jihadists based over the border in Malaysia.

The new season of Sky Arts Playhouse Presents comprises 11 short dramas and comedies from a range of writers including Will Self, Paul O'Grady and Sandi Toksvig. The first play - The Minor Character - stars David Tennant as Will - a very unreliable narrator who finds himself increasingly marginalised by his circle of friends.

The first major survey of Damien Hirst's work in the UK has opened at Tate Modern in London. It brings together 70 of his works including landmark pieces like The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, A Thousand Years and For the Love of God.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests Gillian Slovo, Kathryn Hughes and David Benedict review the week's cultural highlights including The Chemistry of Tears.

In Peter Carey's extraordinary latest novel, The Chemistry of Tears, Catherine Gehrig, conservator at a museum, learns of the sudden death of her colleague and lover of thirteen years. As the mistress of a married man, she must struggle to keep the depth of her anguish to herself. Catherine is given a special project in a quiet annexe where she reluctantly unpacks an eerie automaton that she has been charged with bringing back to life.

The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster's great Jacobean tragedy and poetic masterpiece tells the dark and bloody story of the recently widowed Duchess as she struggles to retain strength and dignity in the face of death. Starring Eve Best.

In the film Tiny Furniture, the director cast her own mother and sister and shot it in the family apartment. It tells the story of Aura who returns home from her American Midwest liberal arts college to her artist family's New York trendy loft. She takes a job as a hostess at a restaurant and falls into relationships with two self-centred men while struggling to define herself.

The V&A's major new exhibition showcases the best of British design from the 1948 "Austerity Olympics" to the summer of 2012. Works range from the Morris Mini Minor, created in 1959, to the newly commissioned model of Zada Hadid's London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympics.

Smash is an American musical drama tv series produced by Steven Spielberg. The show revolves around the creation of a new Broadway musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. As the production takes shape, everyone involved in it must balance his or her often chaotic personal life with the all consuming demands of a life in the theatre.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests actress Fiona Shaw, playwright Mark Ravenhill and writer Susan Jeffreys review the week's cultural highlights including The Master and Margarita.

The Master and Margarita is Simon McBurney's theatrical adaptation of the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. The ambitious Complicite production at the Barbican stars Paul Rhys as both The Master - a writer driven mad by the opposition to his unpublished novel - and Satan, who visits 1930s Moscow with his demonic retinue.

In Greg Baxter's debut novel The Apartment the narrator is an American veteran of the Iraqi War who has moved to an unnamed northern European city. Over the course of a freezing winter day he and Saskia - who may or may not be his girlfriend - cross the city, trying to find him an apartment. As the day progresses his memories of his time in Iraq begin to indicate why he has moved to an unfamiliar city where he can find anonymity.

Jean- Pierre and Luc Dardenne's film The Kid With A Bike won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes last year. It stars Thomas Doret as an 11 year old who is abandoned in a children's home by his father, but is befriended by a hairdresser ( Cecile de France) who he runs into by chance. He is single-minded in his desire to track down both his father and his bike.

Kensington Palace in London is a royal residence which has just reopened its public areas following a £12 million renovation programme. Among the improvements is a permanent exhibition - Victoria Revealed - which traces the monarch's life in her own words from her childhood in the house, to her first meeting with her Privy Council as monarch in the Red Saloon and her first sight of Prince Albert on the staircase. There have also been major changes to the exhibits in the King's and Queen's State Apartments.

The Syndicate is a new 5 part drama for BBC1 by Kay Mellor. It focuses on a group of five supermarket workers in Leeds who win £18 million on the lottery. It stars Timothy Spall and each of the five episodes is from the viewpoint of one of the winners.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Sarfraz Manzoor and his guests novelist Liz Jensen and the writers Susannah Clapp and Giles Fraser review the cultural highlights of the week - including Can We Talk About This?, a physical theatre piece that sets out to explore the issues of Islamic extremism, multiculturalism and freedom of speech. It's set to a text that has been taken from over 40 interviews and asks - have well-intended multicultural policies inadvertently ended up betraying the very minorities and freedoms Britain ought to be protecting?

The classic novel Gullivers Travels has been adapted and updated by the cartoonist, and satirist, Martin Rowson into a graphic novel. He sets his book in the late 1990s and his hero - a distant descendant of Swift's Lemuel Gulliver - is a former Government employee who has travelled the world working for various NGOs and charities. The Lilliput that Gulliver arrives into has an oddly familiar Prime Minister with large ears and a semi-crazed smile.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a brooding and philosophically searching film that won the Grand Prix prize at Cannes last year. The story takes place during one night as a convoy of three vehicles, containing a dozen men, drive through the badlands of Turkey. The convoy contains two murder suspects who are trying to take the policemen, prosecutor and doctor they are travelling with to the location where they buried their victim.

Death Row is a new TV documentary series where the iconoclastic director Werner Herzog takes an inside look at a maximum security prison in Texas, featuring interviews with death row inmates.

Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude is an exhibition which focuses on the debt that the British painter owed to the 17th century French artist Claude Lorrain. When Turner died, he bequeathed two large paintings to the National Gallery, on the condition that they were hung between two specific works by Claude.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests the writers Kamila Shamsie and Louise Doughty and the poet Paul Farley review the week's cultural highlights.

Bel Ami is Declan Donnellan's first feature and is an adaptation of the novel by Guy de Maupassant. It stars Robert Pattinson as an ambitious young man who climbs from poverty and obscurity in Belle Epoque Paris, using three married high society women (Christina Ricci, Uma Thurman and Kristin Scott Thomas) as the rungs on his ladder.

Silver is Andrew Motion's sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's classic adventure story Treasure Island. Forty years on from the events in that book, Jim Hawkins is the disillusioned and drunken owner of a Thameside pub. His son - also called Jim - is dissatisfied with his own life of drudgery, but everything changes when a young woman turns up who wants him to meet her father - a one-legged man called Silver.

Going Dark is a new piece by the theatre company Sound and Fury at the Young Vic in London. Written by Hattie Naylor and performed in darkness (sometimes partial, sometimes total) it stars John Mackay as a lecturer at a planetarium who discovers that he is going blind.

Louise Bourgeois: Return of the Repressed is an exhibition at the Freud Museum in London which features work by the artist along with a selection of recently discovered psychoanalytic writings that she made from 1951 until the 1980s.

Julian Fellowes' follow up to Downton Abbey is another ITV drama set in the early 20th century with the class system at its heart. Titanic is a four part series which revisits the familiar story of the doomed ocean liner.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writers Linda Grant and Miranda Sawyer and academic John Mullan review the week's cultural highlights including The Leisure Society

The Leisure Society at Trafalgar Studios in London is a play by Canadian playwright Francois Archambault. It's an account of an awkward evening in the lives of a well-to-do New York couple (played by Ed Stoppard and Melanie Gray) who have recently had their first child. When they invite a friend around for dinner to tell him they don't want to see him any more, the cracks in their perfect life begin to show.

Lost Memory of Skin is Russell Banks' novel about a young man known only as the Kid. The Kid is a homeless sex offender living in a squatter camp under a causeway on the Florida coast whose life faces even more disruption, first when the camp is raided by the police and then when a professor of sociology co-opts him into helping with his research.

Argentinian director Pablo Trapero's film Carancho stars Ricardo Darin as a lawyer who has lost his licence and is reduced to making a living by chasing ambulances. He works for a shady company that offers legal help to traffic accident victims but ultimately creams off most of their compensation payments.

Game Plan is a major retrospective of the work of Italian artist Alighiero Boetti at Tate Modern. Boetti started as a member of the Arte Povera movement in the 1960s, but soon dissociated himself from it to make algorithmic works which derived from simple rules and repeated processes.

Touch is a new TV series from Tim Kring - the man behind Heroes. It stars Kiefer Sutherland as Martin Bohm a former journalist who has struggled to look after his autistic son since the death of his wife on 9/11. His son is obsessed with numbers, but a series of unexplainable events suggests that he is using these numbers to communicate and to predict the future.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests Deborah Moggach, Paul Morley and Kevin Jackson review the week's cultural highlights including Capital by John Lanchester.

The Bomb: A Partial History at the Tricycle Theatre in London is a series of ten specially commissioned short plays on the subject of nuclear proliferation. It includes work by Zinnie Harris, David Greig and John Donnelly.

The action in John Lanchester's novel centres around the people living and working in a well-to-do London street - Pepys Road - in the months leading up to the banking crash of 2008. The characters include a banker, a Polish builder, a Premiership footballer and a Zimbabwean asylum seeker working as a traffic warden.

Woody Harrelson stars as a corrupt LA cop - Dave Brown - in Oren Moverman's film Rampart. Brown is under investigation after savagely beating a motorist who crashed into his patrol car, but he is unrepentant and both his personal and professional life are out of control.

Paula Milne's BBC2 drama series White Heat traces the lives of a group of seven friends who first meet as students sharing a flat in London in 1965. It stars Claire Foy, Sam Claflin and Juliet Stevenson.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests historian Dominic Sandbrook, writer Lisa Appignanesi and poet Cahal Dallat review the week's cultural highlights including The Recruiting Officer.

George Farquhar's 1706 play The Recruiting Officer is Josie Rourke's first production in her new role of Artistic Director at the Donmar Warehouse in London. It stars Tobias Menzies as Captain Plume who, assisted by Sergeant Kite (Mackenzie Crook), has come to Shrewsbury to enlist the men of the town, but is also in pursuit of a local heiress (Nancy Carroll).

Lysander Rief is the hero of William Boyd's novel Waiting For Sunrise. Rief visits Vienna in 1913 to undergo psychoanalysis for a sexual problem, but an affair with a fellow patient leads to a series of sinister complications in his life which continue to trouble him through the opening years of the First World War.

Stephen Daldry has made a film of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close starring Thomas Horn as Oskar, a young boy who sets out on a solo mission across New York City after his father is killed in the attack on the World Trade Centre.

Picasso and Modern British Art at Tate Britain in London explores the influence the Spanish artist had on his British counterparts - including Ben Nicholson, Francis Bacon and Henry Moore - throughout his career.

Barack Goodman's four part documentary Clinton tells the story of the boy from Hope's rise to the American Presidency. It includes interviews with many of the people closest to Clinton during his incumbency - those with an inside view of what went right and wrong during his time in office.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelist Dreda Say Mitchell, historian Kathryn Hughes and theatre writer David Benedict review the week's cultural highlights.

A Dangerous Method is David Cronenberg's film which centres around the relationship between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) when psychoanalysis was in its infancy in the early 20th century. Keira Knightley plays Sabina Spielrein - a young woman who Jung initially took on as a patient but who went on to play a pivotal role in the development of the science.

Solomon Kugel - hero of Shalom Auslander's debut novel Hope: A Tragedy - is surprised to find someone living in the attic of the farmhouse that he and his family have moved into. He is even more surprised when the old woman in question claims to be Anne Frank.

Susan Hill's classic ghost story The Woman in Black has now been adapted for the screen by Jane Goldman with James Watkins in the director's chair. Daniel Radcliffe stars as Arthur Kipps, a young lawyer grieving for his wife who died in childbirth. He is sent to a remote village to settle the affairs of an elderly widow who has recently died. The villagers try to dissuade him from visiting the mansion where she used to live and he soon finds out why.

Lucian Freud Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London features work by the artist from the 1940s through to the painting that he was working on at the time of his death last year. It is the first time that a major exhibition of his portraits has been put together.

Homeland is a new television drama by the creators of 24. Damien Lewis stars as Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody who has been missing in Iraq for eight years but is discovered when special forces attack a terrorist camp. He returns home to a hero's welcome, but CIA officer Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) suspects that he may have been turned against the US during his captivity.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writers Natalie Haynes and Terence Blacker and anthropologist Kit Davis review the week's cultural highlights including Martha Marcy May Marlene

Sean Durkin's film Martha Marcy May Marlene stars Elizabeth Olsen as Martha - a young woman who comes to stay with her estranged sister after running away from a sinister utopian cult.

Alex Preston's novel The Revelations features an evangelical movement called the Course whose founder - charismatic priest David Nightingale - wants to turn it into a global brand. The four young members he has chosen as his leaders have difficulty squaring the demands of religion and high finance.

She Stoops to Conquer - the classic comedy by Oliver Goldsmith - revolves around mistaken identity and misunderstandings. In Jamie Lloyd's production at the National Theatre Steve Pemberton plays Mr Hardcastle whose house is mistaken for an inn by his daughter's suitor.

David Shrigley: Brain Activity at the Hayward Gallery in London is the first major UK survey of Shrigley's works. It features 68 new works made specifically for the exhibition and includes many of his idiosyncratically artless but witty drawings alongside animated films and 3D pieces.

Luck is the latest television drama by David Milch whose previous work includes NYPD Blue and Deadwood. Directed by Michael Mann, it stars Dustin Hoffman as Chester 'Ace' Bernstein - a criminal kingpin who has just served 3 years in jail. He now has plans to introduce casino gambling to a racetrack outside Los Angeles, but he needs to move stealthily.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.