You Were Never Really Here stars Joaquin Pheonix as a contract killer who uncovers a conspiracy while trying to save a kidnapped teen from a prostitution ring. The film is directed by Lynne Ramsay who made We Need to Talk About Kevin. Larushka Ivan-Zadeh reviews. What's the key to delivering a perfect performance as an award ceremony host? TV critic Emma Bullimore and Larushka Ivan-Zadeh review Jimmy Kimmel's efforts in last night's Oscars ceremony, as well as Joanna Lumley at the BAFTAs and Jac...
Mar 05, 2018•29 min
Jess Thom is a founding member of Touretteshero, a theatre company that celebrates the inherent creativity and humour in Tourette's. She is taking on Samuel Beckett's Not I, a rapidly delivered monologue spoken by a character called Mouth. Jess explains why the text captures her own experience of living with Tourette's and her mission to make theatre more accessible. "Gaslighting" is a term that sprang from Patrick Hamilton's play Gas Light written 80 years ago, in which a husband attempts to co...
Mar 02, 2018•33 min
Half a century after Kenneth Clark's ground-breaking television series on the history of art, Civilisation, the BBC has returned to the same subject - a history of visual culture - but pluralised the name and the number of presenters in the new series. Former television critic of the Financial Times Chris Dunkley and writer and classicist Natalie Haynes review. Wendy Cope is one of the country's best-known and best-loved poets, thanks partly to the fact that her poems are easy to understand and ...
Mar 01, 2018•30 min
Sharon Horgan, the comedy actress and writer behind Pulling, Motherhood and Catastrophe features in her first major Hollywood film, Game Night. She tells Kirsty about the difference between working on American movies and British television and why series like Catastrophe aren't , in fact, sitcoms. Syrian musician Maya Youssef brings her qanun into the studio and performs from her album Syrian Dreams. Samantha's Harvey's latest novel, The Western Wind, is a literary medieval whodunit with an inge...
Feb 28, 2018•33 min
A Fantastic Woman is a Chilean film about a transgender woman whose partner dies and she has to cope with his transphobic family. The film has been shortlisted for best Foreign Language film at the Oscars. Rebecca Root, trans actress and activist, reviews. British film director Lewis Gilbert has died aged 97. Critic Jason Solomons assesses his long career with films including Reach for the Sky, Alfie, The Spy Who Loved Me, Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine. In the wake of recent scientific in...
Feb 27, 2018•39 min
We hear about the second series of the American Crime Story television franchise which began in 2016 with The People Versus OJ Simpson. John Wilson is joined in the studio by novelist turned screenwriter Tom Rob Smith. He has written the next instalment - The Assassination of Gianni Versace - which dramatises the events surrounding the murder of the Italian fashion designer outside his Miami home in 1997. Freud and Bacon are at the heart of Tate Britain's latest show, and there is a whole room o...
Feb 26, 2018•35 min
Jennifer Lawrence stars in new film Red Sparrow as a prima ballerina turned Russian spy trained to seduce her targets. The film is based on a successful novel by former CIA operative Jason Matthews and helmed by Frances Lawrence who also directed Lawrence in the Hunger Games film series. Film critic Anna Smith reviews. David Edgar's adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, starring Phil Daniels, is currently touring the country. April de Angelis has adapted Frankenstein for the Manchester Royal Exch...
Feb 23, 2018•39 min
Tracey Thorn describes her new record 'Record' as 'nine feminist bangers'. She talks to John Wilson about why electro-pop turns out to be her preferred style for a musical look back at various stages in her life from birth, through teenage crushes and learning to play guitar to motherhood. The Finnish National Gallery has just become the latest institution to make digital images of works in its collection, that are no longer in copyright, freely available to the public. No major UK arts institut...
Feb 22, 2018•41 min
Playwright Dennis Kelly's emotional new play Girls and Boys centres on the story of a woman in an aggressive man's world. Kelly and actor Carey Mulligan, the star of the one-woman show, discuss the disturbing themes in the play and the challenges of performing it. Following a major leak from the Game of Thrones set - and the accompanying outrage - we ask writer Gareth McLean and TV critic Emma Bullimore whether our aversion to spoilers has now gone too far. Boyd Hilton reviews Mosaic, a new TV d...
Feb 21, 2018•29 min
I, Tonya is a new biopic about figure skater Tonya Harding, who was known as the bad girl of the ice rink. The film stars Margot Robbie and Allison Janney who've won a Golden Globe and a BAFTA respectively for their performances. Briony Hanson reviews. With the Winter Olympics in full swing we ask 'is figure skating a sport or an art'? Robin Cousins, former Olympic champion and current commentator at the figure skating at the Games in Pyeongchang, and Debra Craine, dance critic of The Times, dis...
Feb 20, 2018•36 min
To mark the 100th anniversary of women over 30 getting the vote in the UK we have a themed programme looking at the art that was created alongside the suffrage campaign and we celebrate the contribution of female artists. For the last two weeks we've been asking Front Row listeners to nominate their favourite art work by a woman. Jenny Éclair and Rosie Fletcher come into the studio to champion their picks in a head to head choosing Tracey Emin's My Bed and Nora Ephron's script for When Harry Met...
Feb 19, 2018•29 min
The trauma of child abuse lies at the heart of two new memoirs - Louise Allen's Thrown Away Child, and The Only Girl in the World by the French writer Maude Julien. As they look back over their years of mistreatment by the adults in their lives, they explain how they found solace in art and literature - which provided both a lifeline, and an escape from pain and deprivation that was being inflicted on them from a very early age. Presenter Stig Abell Producer Jerome Weatherald....
Feb 16, 2018•29 min
Actor Ruth Wilson talks about starring in Clio Barnard's new film Dark River, a powerful psychological drama about a sheep farming family in Yorkshire. She also discusses the BBC TV drama she is making about her grandfather, a novelist who she recently discovered was also a spy with several wives. A new report, commissioned by the Art Fund, has called for greater investment in museum collections as museums and galleries in Britain struggle to keep up with the international art market. Cultural p...
Feb 15, 2018•32 min
Greta Gerwig recently made history as the first woman to be Oscar-nominated for her directorial debut, Lady Bird. She tells Kirsty why she wrote a coming of age drama about a confused teenage girl growing up in her own hometown of Sacramento, and why she is now keen to write a play or act on the West End stage. Writer Benjamin Markovits was shortlisted for the BBC's National Short Story Award last year. This year he is one of the judges alongside television presenter Mel Giedroyc, poet Sarah How...
Feb 14, 2018•31 min
The Shape of Water leads this year's Oscars race with 13 nominations. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, it's an other-worldly fairy tale about a mute cleaner (Sally Hawkins) who falls in love with an alien-like creature imprisoned at the high-security laboratory where she works. Mark Eccleston reviews. As a blockbuster exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors opens at the World Museum in Liverpool, featuring objects from the burial ground of China's First Emperor never before seen in this country, Sa...
Feb 13, 2018•36 min
Musician and campaigner Bob Geldof discusses A Fanatic Heart, his feature length documentary about poet W B Yeats. He explains how he came to love the poetry of Yeats and why he considers the Nobel prize-winning poet to be one of the founders of modern Ireland. As Fifty Shades Freed, the third and final instalment of the Fifty Shades franchise is released in cinemas this week, literary critic Alex Clark and Clare Binns, director of programming and acquisitions for Picturehouse Cinemas discuss th...
Feb 12, 2018•33 min
Chadwick Boseman discusses taking on the role of Black Panther, the first black mainstream comic book hero, and talks about the responsibility he feels in taking on the first black lead in a superhero film. Following the release of Black Panther, critic Dreda Say Mitchell, and comic book writer, Kieron Gillen, review the film, and consider whether the time of the black superhero has finally arrived. When and how should we be introducing children to Shakespeare? Is it better to start with the sto...
Feb 09, 2018•29 min
Playwright David Hare talks to Samira about his latest television drama Collateral, a series that begins like a police procedural but drifts into a state-of-the-nation thriller. Carey Mulligan stars as a police detective whose investigation into the shooting of a pizza delivery man has spiraling repercussions. Carmen is opera's greatest femme fatale, the sexually liberated cigarette factory worker killed by her spurned lover. Opera critic Alexandra Coghlan and opera historian Flora Willson discu...
Feb 08, 2018•34 min
Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz on their new film The Mercy, which tells the true story of the ill-fated attempt in 1968 by the amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst to become the first person to sail solo, non-stop, around the world. Vaseem Khan discusses his latest Inspector Chopra novel, about an Indian detective with a baby elephant as his sidekick, which he has written as a Quick Read. As Irish and Northern Irish women poets campaign for greater recognition in their home country, we discuss the gend...
Feb 07, 2018•31 min
As artists back photographer Nan Goldin's call to hold arts patrons the Sackler family to account over the US opioid crisis, we discuss the ethics of funding the arts. Soul singer Mica Paris talks about her current projects exploring the life and work of legendary jazz pioneer Ella Fitzgerald, and performs live in the studio. Jim Crace has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. He talks to John about his new novel The Melody. Set in an unnamed town on the Mediterranean, its main charac...
Feb 06, 2018•32 min
Mike Bartlett, the writer of Doctor Foster and Charles III, on his new three-part TV drama Trauma, in which Adrian Lester stars as a surgeon accused of negligence by a patient's father, played by John Simm. Last week a new prize was launched for thriller novels that do not include any violence against women. Since that announcement the Staunch Book Prize has been both lauded as much needed, and criticised for being censorial. We discuss the prize with its founder Bridget Lawless and crime-writer...
Feb 05, 2018•29 min
Nicola Benedetti has co-written a new cadenza for Beethoven's Violin Concerto. As she embarks on a tour with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, she talks to Kirsty Lang about the challenges of performing this classical masterpiece. Jason Solomons reviews Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built, which stars Helen Mirren in the first horror movie of her 50 year career and is set in the real life house that the Winchester gun heiress built to keep ghosts at bay. As part of Reading Europe Ra...
Feb 02, 2018•35 min
Simple Minds, the stadium-filling band from Glasgow, have been together for 40 years. As they release Walk Between Worlds, lead singer Jim Kerr looks back on the four decades and the band perform an acoustic version of a song from the new album. Reputed to be Daniel Day-Lewis' final film before retiring from acting, Phantom Thread travels behind the doors of London's 1950s fashion houses. Film critic Catherine Bray discusses director Paul Thomas Anderson's latest project. Theatre company Told by...
Feb 01, 2018•34 min
All day long I'd bidi-bidi-bum... Sheldon Harnick is 93 and won worldwide acclaim as the lyricist of the hugely successful Fiddler on the Roof. As a new production of Rothschild & Sons, one of his lesser-known musicals, opens in this country he talks about a lifetime of lyrics. Britain's first professor of Musical Theatre, Professor Millie Taylor, and theatre critic David Benedict discuss the evolution of the musical since the premiere of Fiddler on the Roof in 1964. The Danish Icelandic art...
Jan 31, 2018•33 min
Last year, wunderkind playwright James Graham premiered three plays Ink, Labour of Love, and Quiz which looked respectively at the rise of the Sun newspaper, Labour party history; and the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire "coughing Major" scandal. As he begins 2018 with another premiere, The Culture: A Farce in Two Acts, he discusses turning his attention to Hull's year as City of Culture and his desire and energy to keep creating new work. The V&A's new exhibition Ocean Liners: Speed and Style ...
Jan 30, 2018•29 min
Former National Theatre director, Sir Nicholas Hytner on his new production of Julius Caesar, starring Ben Whishaw and David Morrissey, which offers the audience a chance to stand and be immersed in the action. Sir Nicholas talks about the staging, how contemporary politics resonates with this Shakespeare play and about his new venue the Bridge Theatre. Ruth Barnes looks at what the list of Grammy winners says about the current state of popular music. The pioneering architect Neave Brown, respon...
Jan 29, 2018•29 min
As part of Radio 4's Reading Europe season, Kirsty Lang explores Turkish literature in Istanbul, talking to leading writers including Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. Critics Kaya Genc and Nagihan Ibn Haliloglu discuss how the Turkish literary scene compares to our own: what are the bestselling books, and how are writers dealing with the current political situation, given Turkey has imprisoned more writers recently than any other country. Orhan Pamuk on his latest novel The Red-Haired Woman (Radio 4'...
Jan 26, 2018•28 min
In 2016 Paapa Essiedu became the first black actor to play Hamlet for the RSC. As he reprises the role for a tour of the production we speak to the actor tipped to be a star, about Hamlet and his performances in television dramas Kiri and The Miniaturist. It's rare for a poetry essay to make the news headlines but that's exactly what's happened to the essay written by Rebecca Watts in the current issue of PN Review. She talks to Samira about her problem with the poetry establishment and explains...
Jan 25, 2018•33 min
Now just 18, cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason won the title of BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2016. His choice of repertoire ranges from Shostakovich to Bob Marley and he plays live in the studio on the release of his debut album, Inspiration. Following the announcement of the death of Ursula K. Le Guin, the Earthsea writer's literary agent Ginger Clark and fantasy novelist Vic James discuss her legacy. Charles I (1600-1649) acquired and commissioned an extensive collection of art, including works ...
Jan 24, 2018•30 min
The nominations for the 90th Academy Awards were announced earlier today, with Guillermo del Toro's fantasy romance The Shape of Water receiving the most, including best picture. Stig Abell is joined by film critics Larushka Ivan-Zadeh, Gaylene Gould and Tim Robey to consider the winners and losers, and to assess whether the nominations reflect events of 2017 including Weinstein and #MeToo, and whether there is a better representation of BAME talent than in previous years. Presenter Stig Abell P...
Jan 23, 2018•37 min
