大象传媒

With Philip Dodd

Two first night reviews in this evening's programme. Birmingham Opera Company will be occupying a large warehouse in the industrial district of the city for the world premier of Jonathan Dove's opera, Life is a Dream. Susan Hitch puts on her sensible shoes for a live review from The Argyle Works.

Also, Simon McBurney and his award winning company Complicite return to The Barbican in London to bring new life to Mikhail Bulgakov's classic, The Master and Margarita. Through a combination of performance theatre, video projection and puppetry, they animate the story of the Devil's visit to atheistic Soviet Russia. Paul Allen has the verdict.

It is almost exactly 80 years since the great Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky was born on April 4th 1932. How did this child of the Soviet Union become one of the greatest directors of all time, the film directors' director in fact, someone who changed the language of film? Writer, Geoff Dyer, historian Jeremy Hicks and Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Nariman Skakov, discuss the world out of which Tarkovsky's imagination came.

And are we proud enough of our contemporary engineering achievements? Why do we continue to look back to the Victorian engineering heroes of two centuries ago when looking for inspiration? Or is there a hidden world of professional pride in achievements that have long outstripped the Brunels and Bazalgettes of that earlier era? Perhaps the engineers of the future are all digital and can be found currently designing the great games of today? Philip Dodd discusses the romance of the past and the essentials of the future of engineering.