02/04/2011

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. The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860 - 1900 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is the most comprehensive exhibition of its kind to have been staged. The exhibition includes over 250 objects and is set out in four broadly chronological sections tracing the growth and development of aestheticism in Britain over the four decades. Producer: Torquil MacLeod.