16/04/2011

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.