09/07/2011

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests the historian Kathryn Hughes and the writers Kevin Jackson and Adam Mars Jones review the cultural highlights of the week including The Tree of Life.

The Tree of Life is Terrence Malick's allusive and fragmented film based notionally around a 1950s Texan family - Mr and Mrs O'Brien (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) and their three sons - but which also swoops giddily around a time-frame that stretches from the birth of the universe and the evolution of life on Earth to the present day and then on to some kind of afterlife.

That Day We Sang is a play with songs by Victoria Wood which was commissioned by the Manchester International Festival and is playing at the Manchester Opera House. It takes for its inspiration a famous recording of Purcell's Nymphs and Shepherds performed by a choir of Manchester schoolchildren in 1929. The play cuts between 1929 and 1970 when some of the former choir members have their memories of that day triggered by a TV documentar