10/03/2012

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.