Saturday Review

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelists Dreda Say Mitchell and Liz Jensen and art critic Bill Feaver review the cultural highlights of the week.

The murder of five women in Ipswich in December 2006 forms the background to Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork's play London Road at the National Theatre. It deals with the media attention that the residents of the street where the murderer lived had to endure. The words are taken verbatim from interviews conducted by Blythe and set to music by Cork.

When David Foster Wallace died in 2008 he left behind a vast quantity of material that he had been working on for the follow up to to his critically acclaimed 1996 novel Infinite Jest. His friend and editor Michael Pietsch took sackfuls of notebooks, hard drives, files and floppy discs and pieced together Foster Wallace's final, unfinished novel The Pale King about a young man's year spent working for the IRS.

Writer and director Aaron Katz has been corralled into the American independent film subgenre dubbed 'mumblecore'. His latest film Cold Weather is set in his hometown of Portland, Oregon and concerns Doug, a college drop out and Sherlock Holmes fan, who finds himself turning detective when his ex goes missing.

Kate Summerscale's best-selling non-fiction book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher has been adapted for ITV1 by Ian McKay. Paddy Considine stars as Whicher - a detective from Scotland Yard sent to investigate a murder at a Wiltshire country house in 1860.

Joan Miro: Ladder of Escape at Tate Modern is the first major exhibition of Miro's work to be held in Britain for nearly fifty years. Comprised of over 150 paintings, drawings and sculptures, it brings together for the first time the five large triptychs the artist created between 1961 and 1974.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and guests novelist Deborah Moggach, actor Kerry Shale and academic and critic John Mullan review the week's cultural highlights.

Award winning documentary Armadillo by Danish film maker Janus Metz follows a group of Danish soldiers from their arrival in 2009 at a joint Danish and British base in Helmand called Armadillo. The film prompted an official army enquiry into alleged misbehaviour by some of the soldiers following a Taleban ambush and it was announced in November 2010 the base was to be dismantled.

Television writer and humorist Steve Hely's How I Became A Famous Novelist chronicles its protagonist's successful attempt to write a best seller and what he learns about life along the way. Described as an "evisceration" of celebrity culture and literary fame.

Linda Basset stars in acclaimed playwright Simon Stephens's new play "Wastwater" at the Royal Court directed by Katie Mitchell and set in an unlikely theatrical location, the periphery of Heathrow as it explores the lives of those who live there.

And Treasures from the Royal Capital of Macedon opens at the Ashmoleon Museum in Oxford. Until 30 years ago Macedon's capital city Aegae remained relatively unknown. Excavations uncovered then revealed treasures from the tombs of its most famous heroes, King Philip II and his son Alexander the Great.

And a new drama on Channel 5, The Walking Dead, adapted from Robert Kirkman's graphic novels by Frank Darabont, who describes it as a human story about zombies.

Producer: Torquil Macleod.

Tom Sutcliffe and guests writer Kevin Jackson, literary critic John Carey and novelist Louise Doughty review the week's cultural highlights.

Jerzy Skolimowski's film Essential Killing stars Vincent Gallo as Mohammed - a Taliban prisoner who goes on the run from his US captors at a Polish facility and struggles to survive at any cost in the inhospitable winter landscape.

The Free World is David Bezmozgis's first novel and it follows the Krasnansky family as they leave Latvia in 1978 to seek a new life in Chicago. However, when that plan falls through they find themselves stuck in Rome, hoping to move to Canada.

Cause Celebre was Terence Rattigan's final play, first performed months before his death in 1977. Based on a notorious 1935 murder case, Thea Sharrock's production at the Old Vic stars Anne-Marie Duff as the flighty Alma Rattenbury whose husband's murder leads to her facing Niamh Cusack's repressed jury forewoman Edith Davenport at the Old Bailey.

John Braine's 1957 novel Room at the Top has been adapted for BBC4 by Amanda Coe. It stars Matthew McNulty as council accountant Joe Lampton who believes that social mobility is within his grasp and Maxine Peake as the married woman who becomes his lover.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelist Adam Mars Jones, historian Amanda Vickery and film-maker James Runcie review the week's cultural highlights.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a 3D film by Werner Herzog which explores the Chauvet cave in the south of France. The cave was discovered in 1994 and contains paleolithic paintings of animals which date back 35,000 years - the oldest ever found. Wim Wenders has also used 3D for his film Pina (due for release on 22nd April), about the choreographer Pina Bausch. Four of Bausch's most celebrated works are performed by key members of her company.

Philip Hensher's novel King of the Badgers is set in Hanmouth - a small, picturesque Devon town which becomes the focus of national interest when an eight year old girl goes missing. There's a lot more going on behind Hanmouth's closed doors and pastoral facade than is immediately apparent.

Jacques Demy's film Les Parapluies de Cherbourg won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1964. It has now been adapted for the stage by Kneehigh as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and - as in the film - every word of the script is sung to Michel Legrand's original score. Carly Bawden and Andrew Durand are the star-crossed lovers Guy and Genevieve in the rainy Normandy port.

Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everday Life at the Wellcome Collection in London is an exhibition which explores dirt and our relationship to it in six different settings - a home in seventeenth century Delft in Holland; a street in Victorian London; a hospital in Glasgow in the 1860s; a museum in Dresden in the early twentieth century; a community in present day New Delhi; and a New York landfill site in 2030.

Campus is a new comedy series on Channel 4 from the makers of Green Wing. The setting is Kirke University where the behaviour of the teaching staff makes the students look like paragons of virtue and maturity. Andy Nyman stars as the venal Vice Chancellor Jonty de Wolfe.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and guests writer Iain Sinclair, anthropologist Kit Davies and journalist Natalie Haynes review the week's cultural highlights including Neil LaBute's new play "In A Forest Dark and Deep" starring Matthew Fox and Olivia Williams.

Neil LaBute is a film director and writer as well as a prolific dramatist whose past credits include The Shape of Things and the Olivier Award nominated Fat Pig. In A Forest Dark and Deep is set in a country retreat deep in the woods to which college lecturer Betty (played by Olivia Williams) invites her brother Bobby (played by Matthew Fox). As a storm rages outside, a dramatic encounter unfolds within the cabin.

Dr Who's Matt Smith stars as writer Christopher Isherwood in a BBC drama - Christopher and his Kind - which recounts Isherwood's visit to the 1930s Berlin cabaret scene where he embarks on an affair with poet WH Auden and is based on Isherwood's own memoir which he wrote in 1976. The screenplay is written by the writer of "My Night With Reg" Kevin Elyot and Imogen Poots co-stars as Jean Ross, the Sally Bowles character played by Liza Minelli in Cabaret.

Submarine is the debut film of comedian Richard Ayoade and is a touching and funning coming of age story set in Swansea in which Oliver Tate (played by newcomer Craig Roberts) attempts to save his mother from running off with a mystic whilst encountering the perils of his own first love.

Jennifer Egan's new novel "A Visit From the Good Squad" spans several decades and travels across America from San Francisco to New York as it portrays the lives of a group of men and women whose lives collide and then fall apart as the story unfolds. It attracted rave reviews when it was published in the States last year.

And Keeping It Real: Material Intelligence at the Whitechapel Gallery looks at art and the everyday including work by Paul Chan, Arturo Herrera and Martin Kippenberger.

PRODUCER; HILARY DUNN.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests creative director of the Royal Opera House Deborah Bull, poet Cahal Dallat and writer Miranda Sawyer review the cultural highlights of the week including Doug Liman's film Fair Game.

Doug Liman's film Fair Game is based on the true story of Valerie Plame (played by Naomi Watts) - a CIA agent whose cover was blown by White House insiders after her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson (Sean Penn), questioned the evidence that the Bush administration had used as justification for invading Iraq.

Blithe Spirit was one of Noel Coward's greatest successes. In Thea Sharrock's production of the play at the Apollo Theatre in London, Alison Steadman plays Madame Arcati - the medium who brings chaos to Charles Condomine's life when she summons up the spirit of his first wife.

Sean O'Brien's last collection of poetry - The Drowned Book - won both the Forward and TS Eliot prizes when it was published in 2007. His new collection is called November and the voice remains nostalgic, elegiac and distinctively northern.

Jean Antoine Watteau is celebrated as a painter, but his drawings are even more remarkable, demonstrating his mastery of the three crayon technique. Watteau: The Drawings at the Royal Academy in London is the first major exhibition of his drawings to be held in the UK.

Michael Faber's best-selling novel The Crimson Petal and The White was billed as the first great 19th century novel of the 21st century. Now adapted for television by Lucinda Coxon, the four part series on BBC2 stars Romola Garai as the ambitious and erudite prostitute Sugar.

PRODUCER; TORQUIL MacLEOD.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests cultural historian Sir Christopher Frayling and writers Rowan Pelling and Ekow Eshun review the cultural highlights of the week including The Wizard of Oz at the London Palladium.

The Wizard of Oz is Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's first collaboration on a West End musical since Evita in 1976. Danielle Hope stars as Dorothy - she landed the role by winning the BBC talent show Over The Rainbow - and Michael Crawford is the Wizard.

Justin Cartwright's novel Other People's Money tells the story of a 350 year old family-owned bank - Tubal and Co. - which finds itself in trouble after its chairman, Julian Trevelyan-Tubal, leads it into the perilous waters of casino banking.

Archipelago is Joanna Hogg's second film and, like her debut Unrelated, is about the cracks which emerge in an English upper middle class family on holiday. The location is the Scilly Isles and tensions and resentment soon bubble to the surface within the confines of the idyllic rented house.

Nancy Spero was a celebrated American artist and feminist. The exhibition of her work at the Serpentine Gallery in London was initiated by the Centre Pompidou and is the first major Spero show since the artist's death in 2009.

Twenty Twelve is a new BBC4 comedy by John Morton who also wrote People Like Us. It takes the form of a mock documentary following the progress of the Olympic Deliverance Commission in the run up to the 2012 London games and stars Hugh Bonneville and Jessica Hynes.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writer David Aaronovitch, historian Kathryn Hughes and comedian Danny Robins review the cultural highlights of the week including Frankenstein at the National Theatre in London.

Nick Dear's theatrical adaptation of Mary Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein is directed by Danny Boyle. The roles of Victor Frankenstein and the creature he brings to life are played by Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, the two actors alternating the roles nightly.

David Michod's film Animal Kingdom is set in Melbourne and stars James Frecheville as a teenager who finds himself drawn into the criminal milieu of his late mother's violent family. Jacki Weaver plays his grandmother - a ruthless matriarch who calls the shots with her brood of armed robber sons.

Like Nuri, the narrator of his novel Anatomy of a Disappearance, Hisham Matar was born to Libyan parents and grew up in Cairo. And, also like Nuri, his father was abducted by secret agents. After his father's disappearance, Nuri grows up in a world of exile, secrets and an ambiguous relationship with his stepmother.

The 16th century Flemish artist Jan Gossaert is the subject of the National Gallery's exhibition Jan Gossaert's Renaissance. Gossaert visited Rome in 1508 and was the first artist to bring the Italian Renaissance's style of depicting historical and mythological subjects with sensuous nude figures into the art of the Low Countries.

Niall Fergusson's Civilisation is a six part series on Channel 4 in which the historian attempts to explain why Western civilisation became globally dominant in the 16th century and remained so for the next 500 years. The series is based on his book Civilisation: The West and the Rest.