Saturday Review - 16/05/2009

Tom Sutcliffe is joined by novelist Adam Mars Jones, professor of theatre and screen arts Maria Delgado and writer Philip Hoare to discuss the cultural highlights of the week - featuring a spot of bother with cloned Nazis, anarchy at the end of the pier and a theatre director unravelling onscreen. Charlie Kaufman has forged a reputation as an idiosyncratic writer with films such as Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but with Synecdoche, New York, he gets to sit in the director's chair for the first time. The cast, headed by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is impressive and the film is nothing if not wildly ambitious, but whether it's the panel's cup of tea is another matter. John Wyndham may have been dead for 40 years, but that doesn't stop him from having a new book out. Plan For Chaos was written around the same time as The Midwich Cuckoos, but failed to find a publisher at the time. Your average run-of-the-mill, cloned Nazis and flying saucers sci-fi romp, it is now available for you to decide whether those publishers were right or wrong. The BBC Poetry Season is attempting to get poetry to the parts that verse normally doesn't reach - television for a start. We concentrate on two programmes from the season: Why Poetry Matters, presented by Griff Rhys Jones, and Changing of the Bard, in which Ian Hislop investigates the history of the post of Poet Laureate. Turner Prize-winning artist Anish Kapoor has been appointed Guest Artistic Director for the 2009 Brighton Festival. Tom and the team headed down to Brighton and wandered around the town to see some of the striking Kapoor exhibits on view, including the Dismemberment of Jeanne d'Arc in the Old Municipal Market and C-Curve, an extraordinary reflective sculpture on the Downs above the city. Also down in Brighton, Hydrocracker present a unique promenade performance of Joe Orton's The Erpingham Camp on Brighton Pier. Empire, anarchy, knobbly knees and fish and chips all feature in this ambulatory adaptation of Orton's parable of a holiday camp in meltdown.