Saturday Review - 04/12/2010

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelist Deborah Moggach and writers Sarfraz Manzoor and Ekow Eshun review the cultural highlights of the week. Les Parents Terribles was written by Jean Cocteau in 1938 during an eight day opium binge. Chris Rolls directs a new production of Jeremy Sams' translation of the play at Trafalgar Studios in London, starring Frances Barber as a pathologically possessive mother with Anthony Calf as her husband and Tom Byam Shaw as their son. Hammad Khan's film Slackistan portrays a group of aimless, wealthy young graduates trying, without much success, to find some purpose to their lives in Islamabad. Khan says that his film rejects the stereotypical Western view of Pakistan, while also rejecting the prevailing establishment of older cultures and traditions. Rupert Goold's 2007 production of Macbeth, starring Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood, was highly acclaimed and had successful runs both in the West End and in Broadway. Goold has now adapted this production for television and filmed it in the gloomy subterranean spaces of Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire. The result, to be shown on BBC4, is a claustrophobic and visceral modern reimagining of the play. The title of this year's GSK Contemporary exhibition at the Royal Academy is Aware: Art Fashion Identity. It examines how artists and designers use clothing as a mechanism to communicate and reveal elements of our identity and brings together work by 30 different practitioners, including specially commissioned pieces by Yinka Shonibare and Hussein Chalayan. Simon Nye is the latest writer to take on the challenge of adapting Richmal Crompton's much-loved William stories for television. Just William on BBC1 stars Daniel Roche as the subversive schoolboy and also features Martin Jarvis - the voice behind the popular radio adaptations of the stories - as the narrator. Producer: Torquil MacLeod.