23/10/2010

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelists Terence Blacker and Liz Jensen and writer and broadcaster Paul Morley review the cultural highlights of the week Nina Raine's play Tribes has opened at the Royal Court in London. At its centre is Billy, one of three siblings in a competitive, bohemian family and deaf from birth. The play investigates family, belonging and the limitations of communication. Adam Elliot won the 2004 Oscar for Best Animated Short with his film Harvie Krumpet. His feature-length claymation film Mary and Max concerns the 20 year pen-pal correspondence between Mary (Toni Colette) in Australia and Max (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a middle-aged man who suffers from Asperger's, in New York. Lloyd Jones's novel Hand Me Down World tells the tale of a woman who enters Europe illegally from Africa to try and find her son who was taken by his father to Berlin. Her story is told, with varying degress of accuracy, from the perspective of the many different people who she meets on her journey. Cezanne's Card Players at the Courtauld Gallery in London brings together the artist's studies of peasants playing cards - a subject which fascinated him late in his career. This exhibition brings together the different paintings and preparatory studies for the first time. Gaby Hornsby made the BBC series The Secret Life of the Motorway and The Secret Life of the Airport, now she turns her attention to the ubiquitous but overlooked marvel of our electricity supply network in The Secret Life of the National Grid on BBC4. Producer: Torquil MacLeod.