Saturday Review - 02/10/2010

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writer Linda Grant, comedian Natalie Haynes and former cultural historian and writer Christopher Frayling review the week's cultural highlights including Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Michael Douglas returns as Gordon Gecko in Oliver Stone's sequel to his 1987 film Wall Street. Gecko's out of jail and the economy's crashing - is greed still good? Philip Roth's novel Nemesis is set in Newark in the summer of 1944 and explores the impact of a polio epidemic on the closely knit Jewish community. Bucky Cantor is an idealistic playground superintendent who tries to manage the panic as his young charges succumb to the disease. Sebastian Faulks's 1993 novel Birdsong sold more than 1.7 million copies in the UK alone. Now it has been adapted for the stage by Rachel Wagstaff. Trevor Nunn's production is at the Comedy Theatre in London and stars Ben Barnes and Lee Ross. Gauguin: Maker of Myth is the first major exhibition in London to be devoted to the artist for more than 50 years. Assembling more than 100 works from public and private collections around the world, it runs at Tate Modern until January 16th 2011. Channel 4's series The Genius of British Art comprises six individually authored films on different topics. The presenters are David Starkey, Augustus Casely-Hayford, Howard Jacobson, Jon Snow, Janet Street Porter and Sir Roy Strong. There is also an accompanying series of talks by the presenters at the National Gallery in London.