26/02/2011

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writer David Aaronovitch, historian Kathryn Hughes and comedian Danny Robins review the cultural highlights of the week including Frankenstein at the National Theatre in London. Nick Dear's theatrical adaptation of Mary Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein is directed by Danny Boyle. The roles of Victor Frankenstein and the creature he brings to life are played by Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller, the two actors alternating the roles nightly. David Michod's film Animal Kingdom is set in Melbourne and stars James Frecheville as a teenager who finds himself drawn into the criminal milieu of his late mother's violent family. Jacki Weaver plays his grandmother - a ruthless matriarch who calls the shots with her brood of armed robber sons. Like Nuri, the narrator of his novel Anatomy of a Disappearance, Hisham Matar was born to Libyan parents and grew up in Cairo. And, also like Nuri, his father was abducted by secret agents. After his father's disappearance, Nuri grows up in a world of exile, secrets and an ambiguous relationship with his stepmother. The 16th century Flemish artist Jan Gossaert is the subject of the National Gallery's exhibition Jan Gossaert's Renaissance. Gossaert visited Rome in 1508 and was the first artist to bring the Italian Renaissance's style of depicting historical and mythological subjects with sensuous nude figures into the art of the Low Countries. Niall Fergusson's Civilisation is a six part series on Channel 4 in which the historian attempts to explain why Western civilisation became globally dominant in the 16th century and remained so for the next 500 years. The series is based on his book Civilisation: The West and the Rest.