08/10/2011

Synopsis

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests - novelist Michael Arditti and writers Natalie Haynes and Kevin Jackson - review the week's cultural highlights including The Marriage of Figaro.

Fiona Shaw directs the English National Opera production of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. Iain Paterson sings the part of Figaro - a servant whose forthcoming wedding to his sweetheart Susanna (Devon Guthrie) is overshadowed by the fact that his master - Count Almaviva (Roland Wood) - wants to exercise his droit de seigneur.

Paddy Considine is best known as an actor, but he has turned his hand to writing and directing for the film Tyrannosaur. Set on a council estate in Leeds, Peter Mullan plays Joseph - an uncontrollably violent man - who meets Christian charity shop worker Hannah (Olivia Colman) who is, herself, married to a violent and abusive man. Dog lovers - look away now.

Stephen Mitchell adds his name to an illustrious list of translators who have rendered Homer's epic poem the Iliad into English over the centuries. "We return to the Iliad," he says in his introduction, "because it is one of the monuments of our own magnificence". Blood, guts and dabbling deities beneath the walls of Troy.

Conor McPherson established his reputation with the spooky play The Weir. His latest offering - The Veil - also deals with the supernatural, but unlike his previous works, it's set in the past - Ireland in the early 19th century, already haunted by the spectre of famine. A debt-ridden Anglo-Irish widow is pinning her hopes on the marriage of her daughter - Hannah - to an English nobleman, but Hannah claims to hear the voice of her father who hanged himself ten years earlier...

Gerhard Richter is one of the greatest exponents of painting of the last 50 years and the major respective at Tate Modern - Gerhard Richter: Panorama - demonstrates how widely he's experimented with different genres and styles - from German romanticism to Abstract expressionism - since the late 1950s.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.