21/01/2012

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writers David Aaronovitch and Sarfraz Manzoor and historian Amanda Vickery review the week's cultural highlights including the film Coriolanus. Ralph Fiennes makes his directorial debut with a film adaptation of Coriolanus, playing the title role in a modern day version of Shakespeare's play. Vanessa Redgrave plays his ambitious mother who wants him to capitalise on his success as a military leader by entering the political fray in Rome. Julie Otsuka's novel The Buddha in the Attic tells the story of Japanese 'picture brides' who travelled to San Francisco nearly a century ago to marry men who they had never met before. They try to fit into a very unfamiliar society and to remain as inconspicuous as possible, but the attack on Pearl Harbor suddenly makes them very visible and very vulnerable. Anthony Sher stars in Nicholas Wright's new play Travelling Light, directed at the National Theatre by Nicholas Hytner. He plays a timber merchant in a shtetl somewhere in Eastern Europe in the early 20th century who has a profound influence on a local boy who goes on to become a big shot film director in Hollywood. Since the publication of Sebastian Faulks' novel Birdsong in 1993, there have been various unsuccessful attempts to adapt it for the screen. Abi Morgan has finally created a two part dramatisation for BBC1 which tells the story of the young Englishman Stephen Wraysford (played by Eddie Redmayne) - his romance in France before the First World War and then his experiences as an officer in the trenches. David Hockney: A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy in London is the first major exhibition in the UK to showcase the artist's landscape work. The vast majority of the paintings here have been made in the last few years and feature one landscape - the Yorkshire Wolds. Producer: Torquil MacLeod.