17/03/2012

Sarfraz Manzoor and his guests novelist Liz Jensen and the writers Susannah Clapp and Giles Fraser review the cultural highlights of the week - including Can We Talk About This?, a physical theatre piece that sets out to explore the issues of Islamic extremism, multiculturalism and freedom of speech. It's set to a text that has been taken from over 40 interviews and asks - have well-intended multicultural policies inadvertently ended up betraying the very minorities and freedoms Britain ought to be protecting? The classic novel Gullivers Travels has been adapted and updated by the cartoonist, and satirist, Martin Rowson into a graphic novel. He sets his book in the late 1990s and his hero - a distant descendant of Swift's Lemuel Gulliver - is a former Government employee who has travelled the world working for various NGOs and charities. The Lilliput that Gulliver arrives into has an oddly familiar Prime Minister with large ears and a semi-crazed smile. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a brooding and philosophically searching film that won the Grand Prix prize at Cannes last year. The story takes place during one night as a convoy of three vehicles, containing a dozen men, drive through the badlands of Turkey. The convoy contains two murder suspects who are trying to take the policemen, prosecutor and doctor they are travelling with to the location where they buried their victim. Death Row is a new TV documentary series where the iconoclastic director Werner Herzog takes an inside look at a maximum security prison in Texas, featuring interviews with death row inmates. Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude is an exhibition which focuses on the debt that the British painter owed to the 17th century French artist Claude Lorrain. When Turner died, he bequeathed two large paintings to the National Gallery, on the condition that they were hung between two specific works by Claude. Producer: Torquil MacLeod.