Saturday Review - 31/10/2009

Bidisha is joined by comedian Natalie Haynes, historian Tristram Hunt and actor and writer Michael Simkins to review the cultural highlights of the week - featuring hot-headed Mexican revolutionaries, Viennese students in a whirl and Romanian chickens in a truck. Ferdinand Bruckner's 1926 play Pains of Youth is set in Vienna and features a group of bored, disillusioned medical students. In the aftermath of the First World War they view their youth as a kind of sickness and see the future as holding two alternatives: bourgeois existence or suicide. Martin Crimp's new version of the play at the National Theatre in London is directed by Katie Mitchell and features some of her typically striking twists of staging. Barbara Kingsolver's last novel, The Poisonwood Bible, was published more than 10 years ago and became a bestseller. The Lacuna is her new novel and the story of its protagonist - writer Harrison Shepherd - is told through letters and entries in his diary. With a Mexican mother and an American father, his life oscillates between the two countries. As a young man in revolutionary Mexico, he becomes close to artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and their houseguest Leon Trotsky, something which comes back to haunt him in the anti-communist climate of postwar America. It is almost 20 years since Nicolae Ceasescu's regime in Romania came to a violent end, but the Ceasescu era is a period which fascinates and inspires the writer and director Cristian Mungiu. His previous film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2007, concerned a young woman trying to procur an illegal abortion. Tales From The Golden Age is more satirical in tone and while there's pathos here, there's also humour. Five urban myths from the twilight years of the communist era are played out, including a village sent into panic by an official visit and a photographer tasked with making Ceausescu look taller than Valerie Giscard d'Estaing. The title poem of Grace Nichols's poetry collection Picasso, I Want My Face Back is written in the voice of Dora Maar, the photographer who was Picasso's lover and muse for ten years and inspired his 1937 painting Weeping Woman. Van Gogh, Munch and Tracey Emin also find their way into the verse here, which is understandable given Nichols's recent stint as writer in residence at the Tate. It's not all art and artists though; there are also poems about her native Guyana, India and the English landscape. Collision is definitely car-crash TV, but in a literal rather than derogatory sense. The ITV1 drama, written by Anthony Horowitz and scheduled to be broadcast over five successive nights, focuses on a group of characters who are involved in a major traffic accident. Douglas Henshall plays DI John Tolin, who is investigates the accident and tries to determine whether two of his colleagues, who were in pursuit of one of the cars, may have been reponsible. But Tolin finds many unsuspected secrets hidden in the wreckage and also has to come to terms with some skeletons in his own closet.