01/09/2012

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests writers Susan Jeffreys, Giles Fraser and Jim White review the week's cultural highlights.

Tim Pigott-Smith plays Prospero in Adrian Noble's production of The Tempest which has just opened at the Theatre Royal in Bath. This staging of Shakespeare's final play is based on the production which Noble directed at the Old Globe in San Diego last year.

Jennifer Egan's 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad won her the Pulitzer Prize. Her follow up - Black Box - had the distinction of making its first appearance as a series of tweets in May. Written in series of terse 'stanzas' it follows a young American on a dangerous espionage mission in the Mediterranean.

Peter Strickland's film Berberian Sound Studio is set in the 1970s and star's Toby Jones as Gilderoy - a mousy sound editor from Dorking who is hired to work on a film in Italy. The film is a 'giallo' horror film and - subjected to increasingly disturbing images and the claustrophobic and oppressive atmosphere of the studio - Gilderoy begins to unravel.

Having played Silvio Dante in The Sopranos, Steve Van Zandt appears as another mobster in Lilyhammer on BBC4. Frank Tagliano needs to disappear after testifying against a Mafia don, so he asks the FBI to arrange a new life for him in Norway. He thought Lillehammer looked pretty when he watched the 1994 Olympics, but it's not quite what he was expecting.

As a young artist Tony Cragg had a studio behind the Science Museum in London and drew inspiration from objects in all the museums along Exhibition Road. Now that the road has been partially pedestrianised, Cragg has been commissioned to site some of his idiosyncratic sculptures along the street and in the V&A, Science and Natural History museums.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.