21/05/2011

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests playwright Mark Ravenhill, novelist Louise Doughty and cultural historian Sir Christopher Frayling review the week's cultural highlights including Win Win. Thomas McCarthy's film Win Win stars Paul Giamatti as a struggling New Jersey lawyer who also coaches a lacklustre high-school wrestling team. For a while it looks as if his problems may have been solved when he becomes the guardian of wealthy, elderly client and, inadvertently, carer of his wrestling champ grandson. In Ali Smith's novel There But For The a guest at a Greenwich dinner party locks himself in his hosts' spare room and refuses to come out. His self-imposed incarceration has an unexpected impact on people who hardly even know him. Deborah Warner's production of The School For Scandal at the Barbican in London draws parallels between Sheridan's satire on 18th century hypocrisy and gossip and our own preoccupation with privacy and the rights of scandal mongers. Alan Howard plays Sir Peter Teazle, anxious not to be cuckolded, while Leo Bill is the rakish Charles Surface. Love Is What You Want at the Hayward Gallery is the first major survey of Tracey Emin's work to be held in London. A wide, chronological selection from her work, it includes embroidered quilts, monoprints, paintings, pieces in neon and found objects. All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace is a series of three television essays by Adam Curtis on BBC2 in which he argues that, despite the utopian predictions of the post-war era, computers have failed to liberate us and have left us even more in thrall to powerful political and economic elites than we were before. Producer: Torquil MacLeod.