07/05/2011

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests poet Craig Raine and writers Susan Jeffreys and David Aaronovitch review the cultural highlights of the week. Saoirse Ronan plays the title role in Joe Wright's film Hanna. Raised by her father (Eric Bana) in the seclusion of northern Finland and trained as a clinical killer, the teenager is pursued by a rogue CIA agent (Cate Blanchett) when she ventures into the wider world. At Last is the last in the series of Edward St Aubyn's novels featuring Patrick Melrose and his family. At his mother's funeral Patrick finds that his transition to orphanhood isn't necessarily the liberation he had so long imagined. All's Well That Ends Well comes to Shakespeare's Globe in London for the first time. Janie Dee is the Countess of Roussillon in Jonathan Dove's production and Sam Crane is her son Bertram who flees to the battlefront when the King of France compels him to marry the low-born Helena (Ellie Percy). The BBC2 documentary strand Wonderland returns with an unusual insight into the work of the relationship counselling organisation Relate. Producer/director Zac Beattie was allowed to record some of the charity's clients during their counselling, but then replaced the visuals with Jonathan Hodgson's animated images, thus allowing the individuals to remain unseen. When Simon Norfolk discovered the pictures which fellow photographer John Burke had taken in Afghanistan during the Second Afghan War between 1878 and 1880 he felt compelled to return to the country and record his own complimentary images of conflict involving the British and their allies there over a century later. The resulting exhibition - Burke and Norfolk: Photographs from the War in Afghanistan - at Tate Modern brings the two men's work together in the same gallery. Producer: Torquil MacLeod.