The Miami singer Gloria Estefan discusses her Cuban roots and the musical and cultural links the country shares with Brazil, as she releases her new album Brazil305. The singer also remembers the sadness she faced as a child when her father returned from Vietnam, contracting multiple sclerosis as a result of the military’s use of Agent Orange. A new film version of Pinocchio has just been released. And if you’re hoping for a wholesome remake of the 1940 Disney film, you’ll be in for quite a surp...
Aug 14, 2020•42 min
Lyricist Don Black looks back at his five decade career writing hit songs and musicals. The first British songwriter to win an Oscar, for Born Free in 1967, Don wrote many classic Bond Themes including Diamonds are Forever and Thunderball. As he publishes his autobiography The Sanest Guy in the Room: A Life in Lyrics, Don talks about his close friendship and working partnership with composer John Barry, and his collaborations with Andrew Lloyd Webber, including Sunset Boulevard and Tell Me on a ...
Aug 13, 2020•28 min
Lovecraft Country is a new 10-episode HBO series, based on the 2016 novel by Matt Ruff, set in 1950s Jim Crow America. The story is about a young African American man whose search for his missing father begins a struggle to survive and overcome both the racist terrors of white America and also terrifying monsters that could be pulled from the pages of horror fiction writer H.P Lovecraft’s weird tales. Writer and broadcaster Ekow Eshun reviews the series. We continue our interviews with the write...
Aug 12, 2020•27 min
From Wednesday, opera lovers will again be able to watch performances at Glyndebourne Opera in East Sussex, although this year the summer festival will look rather different to comply with Covid restrictions. A much-reduced audience will be able to enjoy opera in the open air setting of its sumptuous gardens starting with Offenbach’s French farce, Mesdames de la Halle, in a new translation entitled In the Market for Love. It's been re-imagined to take place in a society recovering from a pandemi...
Aug 11, 2020•28 min
Xiaolu Guo was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 2013. She talks about her latest book A Lover’s Discourse, which is a story of love and language – and the meaning of home set at the time of the European referendum. With a nod to Roland Barthes’ book of the same name, Guo’s novel is told through conversations between a Chinese woman newly arrived in the UK and her Anglo-German boyfriend. It is 100 years since Bernard Leach, with his Japanese colleague Hamada Shojie, establ...
Aug 10, 2020•28 min
To mark the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki this week, the Imperial War Museum commissioned artist and stage designer Es Devlin and her Japanese collaborator Machiko Weston to make a short film in memory of those who died. They discuss their resulting artwork, I Saw the World End. New Perspectives, the Midlands company that takes theatre to rural areas and usually performs in village halls, has come up with a novel idea. For its latest production cr...
Aug 07, 2020•42 min
Arts organisations in the West Midlands say the region is one of the worst hit by the Coronavirus pandemic. In Birmingham, despite emergency relief funding from the Arts Council, the Town Hall and Symphony Hall face cutting half of their workforce, while both the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and the Hippodrome have announced substantial job losses. What impact does it have on a city when its cultural centres are forced to close their doors? Over 20 British playwrights and poets have been commiss...
Aug 06, 2020•28 min
Front Row is featuring interviews with all the shortlisted authors for this year's Women's Prize for Fiction. Tonight, Maggie O'Farrell, whose novel Hamnet is about the son of William Shakespeare who died aged 11, an event thought to be the inspiration for Hamlet. In her novel, Maggie O’Farrell imagines the family life and tragedy of one of our greatest playwrights, about whom so little is known. Group singing has been severely affected by government advice on restricting the spread of Coronavir...
Aug 05, 2020•28 min
Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria discusses her screenplay for the latest big release from Sky Atlantic. Inspired by Anaïs Nin’s collection of erotic stories, Little Birds is set in the famous 'international zone' of Tangier. New York heiress Lucy Savage (Juno Temple) is fresh off the transatlantic steamer and ready for love and marriage in exotic climes. But when her husband Hugo (Hugh Skinner) does not receive her in the way she expected, she spins off into a new su...
Aug 04, 2020•28 min
Barbara Kingsolver talks about her new book, How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) which is only her second collection of poetry. As well as offering practical advice (on knitting, getting divorced, doing nothing) the poems are about family, and making peace with life and death. Barbara also reflects on the redemptive power of art and poetry itself and celebrates the natural world whilst mourning its desecration. All this week on Front Row, creative individuals from the arts are choosing one...
Aug 03, 2020•28 min
Film director Alan Parker is remembered by Dick Clements and Ian La Frenais, who wrote The Commitments. Disney Producer Don Hahn (Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King) joins Samira Ahmed to discuss his new documentary about the legendary lyricist Howard Ashman, who wrote Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid and part of Aladdin, before dying of Aids in 1991 at the age of forty, before Beauty and the Beast was released. Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, writers of comedy classics such as The Lik...
Jul 31, 2020•41 min
Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee discusses her new TV series - psychological thriller, The Deceived. In the drama, inspired by Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Dial M for Murder and other classic films of that time, a student falls for her married tutor and after a shocking death finds herself doubting her own mind. Sculptor Heather Phillipson on putting whipped cream and a cherry on Trafalagar Square’s Fourth Plinth. This morning she unveiled her sculpture, The End - a giant swirl of cream, a cherry, a fly, ...
Jul 30, 2020•28 min
In the run-up to the announcement of the winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction on the 9th of September, Front Row will be hearing from each of the six novelists on this year’s shortlist. We begin today with Hilary Mantel, whose novel The Mirror and the Light is the conclusion of her wildly acclaimed Thomas Cromwell series, which began with Wolf Hall in 2009. Ai Wei Wei’s latest work has opened to the public. The Chinese-born, Europe-based artist has created a piece for London’s Imperial W...
Jul 29, 2020•28 min
Shawanda Corbett, a ceramic artist and performer whose performances combine dance with music, prose and poetry, is the latest in our series of interviews with artists awarded a £10,000 Tate bursary in place of this year's Turner Prize. She was born with one arm and without legs and has developed a unique throwing technique in order to make pottery. Shawanda bases her vessels on people, referenced journeys out of slavery on the Underground Railroad as well as her own personal history of rehabilit...
Jul 28, 2020•28 min
Nigerian British writer Irenosen Okojie has been announced as the winner of this year’s £10,000 Caine Prize for African Writing. It was awarded for her story Grace Jones from her recent collection Nudibranch. We speak to her about the story. Kit de Waal discusses Supporting Cast, her new collection of short stories featuring characters from two of her earlier novels - the international bestseller My Name is Leon and The Trick to Time. Shirley Collins is regarded by many as England’s greatest liv...
Jul 27, 2020•28 min
Film director Mira Nair on A Suitable Boy - her six part BBC One adaptation of Vikram Seth's huge novel. Set in 1951 in newly independent, post-partition India, its cast of more than a hundred is entirely of Indian origin - the BBC’s first historical drama with no white characters. The book inspired Nair's film Monsoon Wedding, and she has long nursed an ambition to film it. How to Build a Girl is the film of Caitlin Moran’s autobiographical novel. We review it alongside Taylor Swift’s surprise ...
Jul 24, 2020•42 min
In July 2005 Anthony Walker an 18 year old black man was killed in a racist attack in Huyton, Merseyside. Jimmy McGovern’s new BBC drama Anthony - inspired by conversations with Gee Walker, Anthony's mother – is a 90 minute film looking at what his life might have been like had he lived. The story works backwards from him imagined at age 25 – married, a father and on his way to a successful career as a lawyer - to the night of his death. Adrian McKinty almost gave up writing but was persuaded to...
Jul 24, 2020•29 min
Oliver Stone has written or directed some of cinema's most powerful films - Midnight Express, Platoon, Scarface, Salvador, Natural Born Killers. Now he has written a memoir, Chasing the Light - How I fought my Way into Hollywood From the 1960s to Platoon. Making films, he tells Tom Sutcliffe, is his vocation, but getting them done...that's never come easily. Feeling betrayed by his parents' divorce Stone dropped out of Yale, he enlisted as a 'grunt' and fought in Vietnam, then was briefly impris...
Jul 23, 2020•28 min
An icon of 1960s feminism and freethinking, Nell Dunn – now in her 80s - author of Up The Junction, Poor Cow and Steaming talks to Tom Sutcliffe about The Muse, A Memoir of Love at First Sight about her friendship with a woman named Josie who inspired much of her work. Kelly O’Sullivan discusses her film Saint Frances which she has written and stars in as Bridget, a 34 year old whose life is transformed when she starts work as a nanny. It's a gentle comedy which explores issues such as post-coit...
Jul 21, 2020•28 min
Josephine Mackerras discusses her award winning first feature film, Alice, which she has directed, written and produced. Alice is living an enviable life in Paris with her handsome husband and young son. Then a card payment is refused, their bank account is empty and her husband disappears. He has spent their money using expensive escorts, which gives Alice an idea about how to save her home and her son – and achieve some independence and control. Welsh artist Sean Edwards has won a Turner Bursa...
Jul 20, 2020•28 min
American actress Alfre Woodard on her powerful lead performance as a death row prison warden in Clemency, written and directed by Chinoye Chukwu, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The government has announced that live performance will be possible again in indoor venues from August. The London Symphony Orchestra has already experimented with socially distanced live performance and their managing director, Kathryn McDowell, joins Front Row to talk about the possibiliti...
Jul 17, 2020•41 min
Film director and writer Mike Hodges, of Get Carter fame, on his 1989 film Black Rainbow, starring Rosanna Arquette. Despite being critically acclaimed, it went straight to video, but has now been restored and re-released on DVD and streaming. Plus, the financial plight of freelance arts workers in the pandemic: the government has agreed a £1.57 billion rescue package for the arts, but how much will make it into the pockets of the many freelance and self-employed arts workers who have been put o...
Jul 16, 2020•28 min
How will community theatre companies help restore audience confidence to go back into theatres after the lockdown? And how do we measure how important they are in bringing people to watch live theatre? Alan Lane is director of Slung Low and Holly Lombardo leads the National Rural Touring Simon Stephenson gave up a career as a paediatric doctor to pursue a career in writing. His first novel Set My Heart to Five, a futurisitic story about an Android who wants to feel human emotion is set to be ada...
Jul 16, 2020•28 min
American country group The Chicks (formerly know as The Dixie Chicks), the biggest-selling U.S. female band of all time, talk about Gaslighter, their first album in fourteen years. Natalie Maines, lead vocalist, and Marti Maguire who plays the fiddle, reflect on the band’s outspoken political stances from the War in Iraq to Black Lives Matter and the effect these have had on their work. Actor Hammed Animashaun has won praise and awards for his role as Bottom in The Bridge Theatre’s production of...
Jul 14, 2020•28 min
Winona Ryder, John Turturro and Anthony Boyle star in a new Sky Atlantic drama The Plot Against America adapted by David Simon from Philip Roth’s alternate history which was first published in 2004. Jonathan Freedland reviews. Rachel De-Lahay brings her letter writing project to the Royal Court Theatre for a week-long online festival. My White Best Friend is Rachel's original letter to her white friend explaining the casual everyday racism and microaggressions her friend commits towards her seem...
Jul 13, 2020•28 min
The Kanneh-Masons are an extraordinarily musical family of seven siblings who spent lockdown together at their home in Nottingham and were filmed by BBC1's Imagine. Tonight we're joined by pianist Isata and cellist Sheku, who perform live from their home, and we also talk to their mother Kadie. Open air theatre performances with socially distanced audiences are allowed from tomorrow, and first out of the block is The Minack Theatre in Cornwall. Director Zoe Curnow talks about restarting her thea...
Jul 10, 2020•41 min
Today is the 25th anniversary of the publication of Northern Lights, the first novel in the His Dark Materials trilogy that introduced Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon to the world. It’s been announced that a previously unseen short story by Philip Pullman about a teenage Lyra, Serpentine, will be published in October. He joins Front Row live to talk about its place in the series and what the novels and last year’s TV dramatisation have meant to so many. Mrs America stars Cate Blanchett as conser...
Jul 09, 2020•28 min
Katori Hall is a playwright from Memphis, Tennessee, whose story of a Southern strip club and the women who work in it has been adapted for television as a series called P-Valley - an “unflinching and unapologetic look” at the lives of women working at a Mississippi club called The Pynk. Cinema after lockdown. The government’s recently announced £1.75bn rescue package for the arts is to be spread across the sector, but what is specifically required by the British film industry and cinemas? Why a...
Jul 08, 2020•28 min
Rufus Wainwright joins us to talk about his new album, Unfollow The Rules, lockdown's threat to live music, and his online robe recitals. In the wake of the announcement of £1.57 billion investment in the arts, John Wilson speaks to Neil Mendoza, the government's Commissioner for Cultural Recovery and Renewal, about how far-reaching this rescue package can be. Tate Britain is giving ten artists £10,000 bursaries in place of this year’s Turner Prize. Critic Louisa Buck discusses the range of arti...
Jul 07, 2020•28 min
Will the government’s £1.57 billion investment in the arts be enough save UK cultural organisations and freelancers? Samira discusses the arts rescue package with Shadow Culture Secretary Jo Stevens, Artistic Director of Leicester’s Curve Theatre, Nikolai Foster, and head of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, Deborah Annetts We speak to dancer and choreographer Wayne McGregor about his latest work “Morgen”, created under lockdown, which strikes a note of optimism in hard times. Ennio Morrico...
Jul 06, 2020•28 min
