12/11/2011

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests playwright Mark Ravenhill, anthropologist Kit Davis and film-maker James Runcie review the week's cultural highlights including Wuthering Heights Andrea Arnold's film adaptation of Wuthering Heights strips Emily Bronte's novel down to the story of Cathy and Heathcliff and ditches the usual costume drama conventions in favour of a muddy realism. Ian Rickson's production of Hamlet at the Young Vic in London places Michael Sheen's prince in what appears to be the secure unit of a psychiatric institution. Claudius (James Clyde) looks less like a king than a consultant psychiatrist and Polonius (Michael Gould) uses a dictaphone to record his observations about Hamlet. Seven Houses in France is the latest novel by Basque author Bernardo Atxaga. Set in a small military outpost in the Belgian Congo in the early 20th century - the arrival of a pious young officer causes a disturbance among his new colleagues who all seem to be involved in various forms of colonial plotting and scheming. Tabloid is Errol Morris's documentary about former beauty queen Joyce McKinney who hit the headlines in the 1970s amid allegations that she kidnapping a Mormon missionary and held him in a cottage in Devon. The National Gallery's exhibition Leonardo Da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan brings together the largest ever number of Leonardo's rare surviving paintings, including international loans seen for the first time in the UK. Producer: Torquil MacLeod.