Saturday Review - 13/03/2010

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by writer Matthew D'Ancona, comedian Danny Robins and writer and professor of English Jacqueline Rose to review the cultural highlights of the week. Martin Scorcese's film Shutter Island is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, but also draws deeply on the director's own passion for film noir. Set in the 1950s, it begins with US Marshall Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) visiting a remote asylum for the criminally insane to investigate the disappearance of one of its inmates. But a storm is blowing in and all is not as it seems. The central character of Ian McEwan's new novel, Solar, is Michael Beard, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist recently appointed to head up a lab investigating renewable power. As a temporary respite from his failing marriage he joins an expedition of writers and artists heading to the Arctic to contemplate climate change, giving McEwan the opportunity to aim some satirical barbs at a similar trip which he went on. London Assurance is a play which Irish playwright Dion Boucicault dashed off in a month in 1841. He was just 20 years old and admitted that the piece would 'not bear analysis as a literary production'. It does, however, provide the scaffolding for a set of brilliant comic performances and, in Nicholas Hytner's production at the National Theatre in London, Simon Russell Beale as Sir Harcourt Courtly and Fiona Shaw as Lady Gay Spanker exploit this virtue to the full. Richard Briers also appears as Lady Gay's doddery old husband Dolly. The Jewish Museum London is about to reopen after a 10-million-pound renovation. It has expanded the building on its original site in Camden in order to unite the objects which were on display in the old museum and the collection of the former London Museum of Jewish Life under one roof. The galleries concentrate on both Jewish religious practice and the experience of Jews as immigrants to Britain. There are interactive displays, a reconstruction of an East End Jewish home and the opportunity to take part in Yiddish theatre karaoke. Love Never Dies is Andrew Lloyd Webber's sequel to his hugely successful musical The Phantom of the Opera. He picks up the story ten years after the end of the original and reveals that the Phantom has moved across the Atlantic to set up business as a showman on Coney Island. He is still yearning for Christine, who is now a famous soprano, and invites her to perform at his amusement park. She arrives with her son Gustave and alcoholic husband Raoul in tow. The scene is set... Ardent fans of the original crowded the blogosphere with their misgivings ahead of the musical's opening night. Even if it doesn't repeat the success of its predecessor will it do enough to win them over?