Saturday Review - 24/07/2010

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelist Aminatta Forna, broadcaster and cleric Richard Coles and writer Kevin Jackson review the week's cultural highlights including Toy Story 3. In Toy Story 3 - Pixar's latest instalment in the hugely successful franchise which made their name - Woody and his fellow toys face an existential crisis precipitated by their owner, Andy, growing up and going off to college. Howard Jacobson's novel The Finkler Question features Julian Treslove, an unspectacular former BBC radio producer who suffers a crisis of identity after he's mugged - he thinks he ought to be Jewish. Georg Buchner wrote the play Danton's Death when he was a 21 year old revolutionary hiding from the police. This dramatic account of the conflict between Danton and Robespierre in post-revolutionary France is now on at the National Theatre in London in a new version by Howard Brenton. Sherlock Holmes is relocated to the 21st century in the BBC1 series Sherlock, written by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. The legendary sleuth is played by Benedict Cumberbatch, with Martin Freeman as his trusty sidekick Dr Watson. Joana Vasconcelos is a Portuguese artist who came public attention at the 2005 Venice Biennale with a chandelier made out of 14,000 tampons. I Will Survive is her new exhibition at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London. Also at the gallery is a show by Polly Morgan - artist and taxidermist - called Psychopomps. Producer Torquil MacLeod.