The panel discussed:
The Mother
 |
I thought
it was a magnificent performance
by both players
|
Hanif Kureshi has confounded the adage "jack of all trades, master of none" with his acclaimed plays, screenplays, and novels - which in the main concern social issues, class differences and sexual freedom.
His works range from The Buddha of Suburbia to My Beautiful Laundrette, to his authorship of pornographic fiction under a pseudonym, to a non fiction book on pop.
Now, with The Mother, he has returned to familiar territory of the warring unhappy family, but added to it a furtive and doomed coupling - between a 60-something widowed grandmother May, played by Anne Reid, and Craig, her son's friend played by Daniel Craig.
The Mother is in cinemas now.
The Pillowman
|
I think it's a brilliant play.
|
Martin McDonagh made his reputation as soon as his first work, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, hit the stage in 1996.
There followed a series of plays set in Ireland which combined stark humour slapstick and violence - the most recent of which was his collaboration with the RSC, The Lieutenant of Innishmore, the hilarious story of psychopathic INLA men.
But all the while he was nurturing a script with a different setting, and with the power of literature at it's core.
The Pillowman is set in a nameless totalitarian state.
A writer whose oeuvre is nightmarish gothic tales of torture and death is arrested along with his disabled brother, for three child murders which mimic his stories.
The Pillowman continues at the National Theatre.
Love by Toni Morrison
|
a novel that
seems to be written by people who
read too many novels
|
Toni Morrison has been garlanded for her novels - she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for her fifth novel Beloved, and in 1993 became the first African American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
She sees herself as telling the tale untold, retreiving the black experience in America and shaping it into a cultural document.
She sets her new novel, Love, in the world of middle-class African Americans in the days of segregation, in an affluent black only seaside resort.
Two women Head the night and Christine are bound together for life when Christine's grandfather hotelier Bill Cosey marries 11-year-old Heed.
Love is published by Chatto.
Charles II
|
The BBC used
to do this a whole lot better.
|
The House of Windsor's family drama is nothing compared to the Royal household in 1660 when Charles II returned to England, the monarchy restored after the rout of Cromwell's son.
The new BBC four part drama The Power and the Passion portrays the King as a charismatic but essentially weak character, more out his cullottes than in, presiding over a court and parliament where sex conquers all.
The action begins however in 1649 at the execution of Charles I - witnessed at least in a dream by his blood splattered son - who is exiled in Holland. There he becomes besotted with the woman who was to bear him several illigitimate children, Barbara Villiers.
The panel were:
Andrew O'Hagan
Newsnight Review, BBC Two's weekly cultural round-up, follows Newsnight on Friday evenings at 2300 GMT.
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