28/07/2012

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests novelist Sarah Hall, playwright Laura Wade and writer David Aaronovitch review the week's cultural highlights including the Olympic opening ceremony.

The London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony - entitled Isles of Wonder - was watched by an audience of millions around the world. From bucolic idyll to a parachuting Queen, our panel assesses how good a job Danny Boyle did of directing it.

Mark Rylance returns to Globe Theatre in London for the first time since he stepped down as artistic director in 2005, to play the role of Richard III. Tim Carroll's production features an all male cast with Samuel Barnett appearing as Queen Elizabeth.

The protagonist of Ned Beauman's Booker long-listed novel The Teleportation Accident is Egon Loeser - a theatrical set designer who we first meet in 1930s Berlin. Despite the time and the place, the intensely apolitical Loeser is almost entirely oblivious to what is going on around him. His main preoccupation is the pursuit of a young woman - Adele - a quest which takes him first to Paris and then on to Los Angeles.

Michelangelo Antonioni's 1964 film Red Desert - now released in a restored version - stars Monica Vitti as Giuliana, a woman left in an agitated and anxious state following a car accident. Against the strange and alienating backdrop of the industrial outskirts of Ravenna - made stranger still by Antonioni's first use of colour film - Giuliana begins an enigmatic relationship with one of her husband's colleagues, played by Richard Harris.

As people from around the world descend on London for the Olympics, Tate Britain celebrates the ways in which foreign photographers have viewed the capital in a new exhibition - Another London: International Photographers Capture City Life 1930 - 1980. The exhibition features 177 images from the collection of 1200 photographs recently donated to the gallery by Eric and Louise Franck. It includes work by some of the biggest names in 20th century photography, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eve Arnold and Bill Brandt.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod.