Saturday Review - 05/12/2009

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by writers Susan Jeffreys and Miranda Sawyer and musician Pat Kane to discuss the cultural highlights of the week. Debbie Allen's Broadway all-black production of Tennessee Williams' play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof comes to London. A powerful Southern family gathers at a birthday celebration for patriarch Big Daddy, who is unaware he is dying. In a scramble to secure their part of his estate, family members hide the truth about his diagnosis from him and Big Mama. Tensions mount between their son, alcoholic former football hero Brick, and his beautiful but sexually frustrated wife Maggie, 'the Cat'. As their troubled relationship reaches a stormy climax, family secrets are revealed. Director Steven Soderbergh's latest film The Girlfriend Experience tells the story of Chelsea, a 2,000 dollar-an-hour escort in Manhattan. Her services include a 'girlfriend experience' where she'll dress with the client in mind, go to dinner and a movie and listen attentively to talk about work and finances. Clients can buy her time but do they ever get the real her? Former porn star Sasha Grey plays Chelsea. The Victoria and Albert museum's new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries have taken seven years and 31.75 million pounds to create. Collections are presented in continuous displays to tell the story of European art and design from the fall of the Roman Empire to the end of the Renaissance period. More than 1800 works of art are on display, including important loans from the British Library, the British Museum and the National Gallery. We've also been looking at the yearly annuals of political cartoons including the Daily Telegraph's financial strip Alex, the Peter Brooks cartoons in the Times and Matt, the Telegraph's front page cartoonist. And enjoying The Art of Russia, a new BBC4 series in which presenter Andrew Graham-Dixon traces the prehistoric elements of Russian culture through the influence of Byzantine art.