07/04/2012

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests Deborah Bull from King's Cultural Institute, writer Adam Mars Jones and BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall review the week's cultural highlights.

Chichester Festival Theatre's 50th anniversary season kicks off with Jeremy Herrin's production of Uncle Vanya. Using Michael Frayn's translation of Chekhov's text it stars Roger Allam as Vanya in a cast which also includes Dervla Kirwan, Timothy West and Maggie Steed.

Pure is Timothy Mo's first novel for 12 years. Its main narrator is Snooky - a Bangkok ladyboy whose life as a hedonistic film reviewer is rudely interrupted when he is blackmailed by the authorities into spying on a cell of would-be jihadists based over the border in Malaysia.

The new season of Sky Arts Playhouse Presents comprises 11 short dramas and comedies from a range of writers including Will Self, Paul O'Grady and Sandi Toksvig. The first play - The Minor Character - stars David Tennant as Will - a very unreliable narrator who finds himself increasingly marginalised by his circle of friends.

The first major survey of Damien Hirst's work in the UK has opened at Tate Modern in London. It brings together 70 of his works including landmark pieces like The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, A Thousand Years and For the Love of God.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.