For Front Row’s Friday review, the author Patrice Lawrence and film critic Hannah McGill consider two new options to stream. Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng’s bestselling novel set in 1997 suburban America and raising questions around class and race, has been made into a drama on Amazon Prime, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. The Icelandic director Grímur Hákonarson won acclaim for his film Rams. In his latest film The County, he tells the story of a woman who singlehandedly ...
May 22, 2020•42 min
Percy Bysshe Shelley called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. A new series of short plays written as we entered the lockdown aims to make playwrights the unacknowledged reporters of the coronavirus crisis. Playwright April de Angelis and Jeremy Herrin, Artistic Director of the theatre company, Headlong, discuss Unprecedented: Real Time Theatre from a State of Isolation – one of the first artistic responses to pandemic. The latest contribution to Front Row's occasional new seri...
May 21, 2020•29 min
How serious is coronavirus for the survival for the performing arts long term? As a government inquiry begins this week, it’s expected that the performing arts that serve an audience in a confined space, such as theatre, music and dance, will take the longest to return to normal, and even then some of the damage may be irreversible. Caroline Norbury, chief executive of the Creative Industries Federation, Deborah Annetts, chief executive of the Incorporated Society of Musicians and Julian Bird, c...
May 20, 2020•28 min
Many TV programmes are on hold during lockdown, but one production house is creating a multi-character series set on board a spaceship travelling through the farthest reaches of unchartered space, filmed in Supermarionation and in Super-Isolation. Creator Stephen La Rivière discusses Nebula-75, starring Gerry Anderson-style puppets. The entire enterprise is being made by a team of three friends in their flat, using bits and pieces from around the flat as props. And it’s proved extremely popular....
May 19, 2020•28 min
This evening's Front Row is packed: Tom Sutcliffe talks to a poet, a novelist, a graphic artist, a cultural entrepreneur and a dramatist - but he has only one guest. Inua Ellams is all of these. This week the National Theatre is streaming in its At Home series Ellams' play Barber Shop Chronicles. It sold out at the National twice and toured the UK and internationally to rave reviews. It is set in a barber's in Peckham, and in Accra, Lagos, Kampala and Johannesburg. Ellams explains that men gathe...
May 19, 2020•28 min
The new Netflix thriller White Lines takes the viewer to the sunshine and drug-fuelled world of 90s raves in Ibiza. A Spanish-British production, it stars Laura Haddock, Daniel Mays and Angela Griffin. For our Friday Review, Rowan Pelling and Gaylene Gould give their verdicts on that and Rainbow Milk, the debut novel by Paul Mendez, which depicts a childhood in the West Midlands where religion and family put pressure on Jesse to repress his sexuality before he escapes to London. Icelandic pianis...
May 15, 2020•41 min
As one of Britain’s best known and loved poets, Benjamin Zephaniah's work has long been featured on the school curriculum. Lately he’s also become a familiar face on television, not least in Peaky Blinders, set in his home city of Birmingham, as well as appearing as a regular panelist on BBC Question Time. But his journey to national literary figure and Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Brunel University has been a remarkable one. There was the relentless racism he faced as in childhoo...
May 14, 2020•28 min
Ten years ago, Jude Kelly founded WOW – the Women of the World foundation – aimed at celebrating women and girls and the challenges they face in society. The former artistic director of London’s Southbank Centre discusses this weekend’s WOW Festival in collaboration with the BBC, the first to take place online because of the pandemic. Emma Thompson reads one of her favourite poems. It's by Liz Lochhead, the former Scottish Makar, and called Photograph, Art Student, Female, Working Class. How do ...
May 13, 2020•28 min
Alicia Keys, the 15-time Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, best known for her hit Girl On Fire and her vocal on Jay-Z’s Empire State of Mind, discusses her early years growing up in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, and her success in the music industry at a very young age, which she describes in her new autobiography, More Myself. Vanessa Redgrave shares her VE Day poetry performance from the recital Voices of Remembrance, cancelled due to the lockdown, and describes the significance of the an...
May 12, 2020•28 min
BBC Director of Content Charlotte Moore – who oversees the BBC’s TV channels, and Stephen Lambert – producer of hit shows including Gogglebox, consider the effects of the lockdown on the TV landscape, and how it will look in the coming months. Will Pound is a virtuoso harmonica player who has been nominated three times for Musician of the Year at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, and who has played with Paul McCartney and Robbie Williams. His new album is a collection of 27 tunes from each of the mem...
May 11, 2020•29 min
Jeremy Deller is one of Britain’s most celebrated artists, best known for his works We’re Here Because We’re Here and The Battle of Orgreave. Mostly collaborative, his work spans music, documentaries, posters, installations and historical re-enactments. From convincing a brass band to cover techno music for his Acid Brass project, to touring a bombed car from the Iraq War around the US, his work encompasses politics, history and social anthropology. His latest projects include Everybody in the P...
May 08, 2020•40 min
Continuing his weekly live performances as Front Row’s Lockdown Artist in Residence, Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson performs live from the empty Harpa concert hall in Reykjavik. Tonight Víkingur will play The Arts and the Hours by Rameau, an interlude from the 18th Century French composer’s final opera, Les Boreades. George The Poet is a London-born spoken word performer of Ugandan heritage. His podcast 'Have You Heard George’s Podcast?' has won armfuls of awards and his work as a recording...
May 07, 2020•28 min
Award-winning film-maker, artist, and writer Miranda July is known for making art out of the everyday and overlooked aspects of life. It was her 2005 film, You, Me and Everything We Know, that brought her to public attention. As a monograph dedicated to her work is published, she joins Front Row to discuss a protean career which has seen her push at the boundaries of making art. In 1982 post-punk group, The Fall, led by charismatic frontman Mark E. Smith, released their fourth album Hex Enductio...
May 06, 2020•28 min
Writer and director Alice Wu talks to Samira Ahmed about her new film, The Half of It, a queer love triangle that draws on the Cyrano de Bergerac story. Set in small town America, the film explores the Asian American experience and navigating love, friendship and fitting in at High School. Among the anxieties associated with the coronavirus pandemic many readers are finding it more and more difficult to concentrate on a book. But the modern adult's ability to concentrate has been under pressure ...
May 05, 2020•29 min
Violinist Nicola Benedetti talks about her new Virtual Benedetti Sessions of free online tuition, and her new album of music by Edward Elgar, including his violin concerto. A new BBC initiative - Music Memories - has been launched to help friends and family of dementia patients communicate with them through music. We're joined by Sarah Metcalfe, from Playlist For Life, and by Sebastian Crutch, Professor of Neuropsychology at the UCL Institute of Neurology. Creation Theatre has found a way of inv...
May 04, 2020•29 min
Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, Front Row’s Lockdown Artist in Residence, continues his weekly live performances from the empty Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik. Tonight he plays an energetic piece by the American minimalist composer Philip Glass, Etude No.9. What has been the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on our mental health and how might being creative at home help our mental wellbeing at this challenging time? Dr Daisy Fancourt is leading the UK’s biggest study looking at the impact...
May 01, 2020•42 min
Oscar-winning director Damien Chazelle discusses The Eddy, his new Netflix musical drama mini-series set in a multi-lingual Paris jazz club, written by Jack Thorne. Dame Emma Thompson reads one of her favourite poems and discusses her new short film Extinction, made during the Extinction Rebellion protests. With cinemas closed and many film releases on hold, what power does lockdown streaming have to change the industry? After the success of Universal's Trolls World Tour as a digital-only releas...
Apr 30, 2020•28 min
James Bay is a multi-award-winning singer-songwriter and guitarist. He has released two albums, Chaos and the Calm, and Electric Light; for which he has won multiple Brits and been nominated for three Grammys. He was recording his third album when lockdown happened, but has been keeping busy - providing guitar lessons of his greatest hits on Instagram. He joins Kirsty Lang to perform his song Hold Back the River and to provide his top tips for beginner guitarists. Chilean director Pablo Larraín ...
Apr 29, 2020•28 min
Panamanian-American baritone Nmon Ford on fusing house music with opera and the legend of Orfeus to create a unique new work which was set to premiere at London’s Young Vic last week. Sinéad Gleeson pays tribute to the great Irish poet Eavan Boland, who died yesterday at the age of seventy five. Boland's poems often drew connections between the lives of Irish women past and present. Author Kit de Waal revisits a novel she has always struggled with - Thackeray's Vanity Fair, and she talks about T...
Apr 28, 2020•28 min
Randy Newman is most widely known as the Oscar winning composer of the Toy Story films and he has won armfuls of Grammys too for his Southern States-inflected music. His latest release, ‘Stay Away’, is a charity single to raise money for the New Orleans’ Ellis Marsalis Center, in memory of the revered jazz musician and founder of the Marsalis dynasty who died from Covid 19. Latin Rocks On is a new book of song lyrics translated into ancient Latin. It’s author Sarah Rowley tells us why it’s a gre...
Apr 27, 2020•28 min
For Front Row’s Friday Review, BBC journalist Sophie Raworth and the novelist Naomi Alderman discuss the new TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s extraordinarily successful novel Normal People. They also review the new collection of short stories by Frances Leviston, The Voice in my Ear. Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, Front Row's Artist in Residence during the lockdown, continues his weekly live performances from the Harpa Concert Hall in Iceland. This week Víkingur will play the sublime Andante from Bac...
Apr 24, 2020•42 min
Oliver Hermanus's new film about a gay teenage conscript and his brutal experience of being in the South African army during Apartheid is called Moffie, a common Afrikaans anti-gay slur. He tells us how a fear of homosexuality fuelled the problem of toxic masculinity that is still so prevalent in the country, and why he used such a provocative title for his film. This week is Lesbian Visibility Week and we’ll be considering how far LGBTQ+ campaigning progress has extended to the visibility of le...
Apr 24, 2020•28 min
Arts Minister Caroline Dinenage on the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis. We put questions to her from arts organisations around the country. Tomorrow marks the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birthday. To celebrate, actor Paapa Essiedu performs the iconic “To Be or Not To Be” soliloquy from Hamlet for us live from his home. Paapa played Hamlet in Simon Godwin’s highly acclaimed 2016 production at the RSC, which transplanted the action from Denmark to West Africa. It will be available...
Apr 22, 2020•28 min
Organist Anna Lapwood, who is Director of Music at Pembroke College Cambridge, performs a Bach chorale prelude, live on the new organ she has installed in her living room. She talks about her virtual Bach-a-thon, for which musicians post videos of themselves playing Bach, and her new role as conductor of the NHS Chorus-19 - a virtual choir of over 700 NHS staff across the UK. Front Row announces the shortlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020, and critics Alex Clark and Sarah Shaffi comment...
Apr 21, 2020•28 min
Leading baritone Roderick Williams was halfway through an ENO run of Anthony Minghella’s production of Puccini's Madame Butterfly at the London Coliseum when it was closed due to the coronavirus. Now at home under lockdown, he joins us to for a special live performance of The Toreador’s Song from Bizet's Carmen in a rather different setting – on Skype from his kitchen. Scots Makar Jackie Kay on a new international poetry project, WRITE where we are NOW, which is inviting poets across the world t...
Apr 20, 2020•29 min
Adam Macqueen talks to Kirsty about his debut novel, Beneath the Streets, a counterfactual thriller set in London in the 1970s which imagines what might have happened had Liberal politician Jeremy Thorpe successfully arranged the murder of his ex-lover Norman Scott. The story, the historic version of which was recently dramatized by Russell T. Davies for television, features a cast of real-life characters including Prime Minister Harold Wilson, his senior adviser Lady Falkender, gay Labour peer ...
Apr 20, 2020•41 min
Comedian Angela Barnes is the new host of Radio 4’s stalwart show The News Quiz. Fresh from recording the first episode of the new series, we ask how they’re keeping it funny when the only story is a deadly virus, and what it’s been like making the show under lockdown when there’s no audience to laugh at your jokes. When the coronavirus pandemic struck, Women’s Prize-winning novelist and games writer Naomi Alderman was in the middle of a new writing project. The subject? A piece of speculative f...
Apr 16, 2020•28 min
Sir Patrick Stewart has been releasing daily readings of Shakespeare's Sonnets on Twitter, recorded in different parts of his Californian home. He tells Kirsty why he's doing "A Sonnet a Day" during the lockdown and what he's discovered about Shakespeare in the process. Mik Scarlet reviews Devs, BBC 2’s new thriller miniseries created by Alex Garland (The Beach, 28 Days Later). Devs is about a computer engineer, played by Sonoya Mizuno, investigating the tech company she blames for the disappear...
Apr 15, 2020•28 min
Comedian Russell Howard on his new lockdown TV show, Home Time. Video conferenced from his childhood bedroom, he gives his entertaining take on life in quarantine, with remote music performances and interviews with comedians and key workers. The 2020 International Prize for Arabic Fiction has been announced today. The winner is Algerian novelist Abdelouahab Aissaoui for The Spartan Court which is set in the early 19th century when Algeria was invaded and captured by the French. Aissaoui is the f...
Apr 14, 2020•28 min
Roy Hudd was a comedian, actor and music-hall veteran whose career spanned seven decades. He sadly passed away in March. Starting out as a redcoat at Butlins in the 1950s, Roy became one the UK's best-loved entertainers. His show The News Huddlines ran for 26 years on Radio 2. When Samira spoke to Roy in 2015, he was approaching his 80th birthday, and was about to play Dame for the first time in panto, in Dick Whittington at Wilton's Music Hall. He discussed a lifetime of entertaining audiences,...
Apr 13, 2020•28 min
