18/02/2012

Tom Sutcliffe and his guests historian Dominic Sandbrook, writer Lisa Appignanesi and poet Cahal Dallat review the week's cultural highlights including The Recruiting Officer.

George Farquhar's 1706 play The Recruiting Officer is Josie Rourke's first production in her new role of Artistic Director at the Donmar Warehouse in London. It stars Tobias Menzies as Captain Plume who, assisted by Sergeant Kite (Mackenzie Crook), has come to Shrewsbury to enlist the men of the town, but is also in pursuit of a local heiress (Nancy Carroll).

Lysander Rief is the hero of William Boyd's novel Waiting For Sunrise. Rief visits Vienna in 1913 to undergo psychoanalysis for a sexual problem, but an affair with a fellow patient leads to a series of sinister complications in his life which continue to trouble him through the opening years of the First World War.

Stephen Daldry has made a film of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close starring Thomas Horn as Oskar, a young boy w