American actress Viola Davis, who has won an Oscar, Emmy and a Tony for her outstanding performances, plays a female warrior in the historical epic The Woman King. Viola Davis and director Gina Prince-Bythewood discuss bringing the story of a 19th Century female general to life. Rona Munro’s trilogy The James Plays were one of the theatrical highlights of the year when they premiered in 2014. She has now returned to Scottish history with two further monarchal plays – James IV: Queen of the Fight...
Oct 03, 2022•43 min
Artist Samson Kambalu talks to Shahidha Bari about his sculpture Antelope, a thought provoking commentary on colonialism which has just been unveiled on Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth. Period gangster drama Peaky Blinders has been turned into a ballet by dance company Rambert. As it opens in Birmingham, Rambert Dance's Helen Shute explains how they've interpreted the TV show for the stage. Screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce and critic Helen Nugent review the first Shakespeare production at the ...
Sep 29, 2022•43 min
The Blackwater Lightship is a novel by Colm Tóibín, published in 1999 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later made into a film and has now been dramatized for the Dublin Theatre Festival. Set in the early nineties, it tells of a young gay man suffering from AIDS who visits his grandmother in rural Wexford and the repercussions his arrival has on her, his mother, and sister. Elle talks to the writer and director David Horan about adapting the novel for the stage, and the issues it rais...
Sep 29, 2022•42 min
Luke Jones meets the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, whose show Only An Octave Apart is about to begin a month long run at Wilton’s Music Hall in London. He discusses how he discovered his range, why he fuses opera with pop and his return to the ENO next year in Philip Glass’s Akhnaten. Luke takes a tour round See Monster in Weston-super-Mare, a retired North Sea rig that's been turned into one of the UK's largest art installations as part of the Unboxed festival. And a discussion on the imp...
Sep 27, 2022•42 min
Michael Winterbottom discusses writing and directing a SKY TV drama, This England, starring Kenneth Branagh as Boris Johnson during his tumultuous first months as Prime Minister and the first wave of the COVID pandemic. GALWAD, an ambitious, multiplatform arts project set in Wales, imagines what it would be like if we could receive messages from people living in 2052. Audiences can follow the story as it unfolds across the week, both online and on social media, and watch a broadcast of the whole...
Sep 26, 2022•42 min
Critics Boyd Hilton and Sarah Crompton review Blonde, Andrew Dominik’s film adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel about Marilyn Monroe. They also discuss Inside Man, a new drama from Sherlock creator Steven Moffat, starring David Tennant and Stanley Tucci. Anna Bailey is the last of the authors shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. They’ll be talking about their story Long Way to Come for a Sip of Water, about a man’s road journey across the vast expanses of Texas, which will be b...
Sep 22, 2022•42 min
Beth Orton performs two songs from her new album, Weather Alive, and discusses creative partnerships as well as life after being dropped by her record label. American author Jodi Picoult has turned Markus Zusak’s best-selling novel The Book Thief into a musical, which has just had its world premiere at the Bolton Octagon. She discusses adapting a novel for the stage and explains why she feels the UK is a more fertile landscape for launching musicals. Jordan Erica Webber, arts and culture broadca...
Sep 21, 2022•43 min
Ralph Vaughan Williams is one of our country's greatest ever composers. Born 150 years ago in 1872, he is known for creating a sense of Englishness in twentieth century music by drawing on his love of folk song, Tudor church music and landscape, in pieces like the perennially popular The Lark Ascending and Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. Samira Ahmed explores his musical language and revels in live performance with her guests, the solo violinist Jennifer Pike , baritone Roderick Williams, ...
Sep 21, 2022•42 min
Bestselling author Louise Doughty discusses her new BBC One drama Crossfire, a thriller about a terrorist attack in a luxury holiday resort, starring Keeley Hawes. She talks about writing for the screen for the first time, after her novels Apple Tree Yard and Platform 7 were adapted for television. Singer songwriter Miki Berenyi, who is best known as part of the 1980s/90s indie rock band Lush, talks about her memoir Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved me from Success. Her book covers her jaw-droppi...
Sep 20, 2022•42 min
Journalist and author Hadley Freeman, and Art UK editor and art historian Lydia Figes, review Ticket to Paradise starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts, and the Winslow Homer exhibition at the National Gallery. And head judge Elizabeth Day joins Front Row for the announcement of the shortlist for the 2022 BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University. The first two shortlisted authors will be talking about what inspired their stories. Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Eliane Glase...
Sep 15, 2022•42 min
Genre-defying South African cellist Abel Selaocoe speaks to Samira and performs a piece from his new album Where Is Home (Hae Ke Kae), which will be launched at a performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. He is about to become Artist In Residence at London's Southbank Centre. His inventive and virtuosic compositions and performance style fuse Baroque repertoire with traditional African music, combining classical cello with body percussion and voice. A rich crop of recent books shows tha...
Sep 14, 2022•42 min
Sir Richard Eyre is one of the UK’s most distinguished and celebrated directors - equally at home in theatre, film, and television. At the age of 79, he has just made his debut as a playwright with his new play, The Snail House, which has just opened at Hampstead Theatre. He talks to Samira about his late literary blooming and what needs to happen for theatre audiences to return to their pre-pandemic levels. The name Sylvia Anderson was recently invoked by Dr. Lisa Cameron MP, during a debate on...
Sep 13, 2022•42 min
Eileen Cooper is a painter and printmaker who’s been quietly creating boldly coloured figurative images and ceramics since the 1970s. This year finally sees the first major review of her work which, in magic realist style, encompasses huge themes: sexuality, motherhood, life and death. The show is called Parallel Lines: Eileen Cooper And Leicester’s Art Collection, and places Cooper’s work next to that of LS Lowry, Pablo Picasso, and Paula Rego, among others. Eileen Cooper talks about her life, ...
Sep 12, 2022•42 min
The trumpeter and musician Alison Balsom has performed with some of the world’s greatest orchestras. She talks about her latest album, Quiet City. Jack Hilton was a plasterer from Rochdale whose groundbreaking writing was praised by both WH Auden and George Orwell. His work fell out of print after the Second World War and he has been largely forgotten. Jack Chadwick, who is running a campaign to revive his works, explains why his works need to be revived. Cabaret performer Rhys Hollis, also know...
Sep 07, 2022•42 min
American singer songwriter Loudon Wainwright III performs live in the studio and talks about his decades-long career, his current UK tour and his latest album titled Lifetime Achievement. Tonight the six books on this year’s Booker Prize for Fiction shortlist will be announced. The literary critic Max Liu joins us to comment. One of these six shortlisted authors will be chosen as the overall winner on 17 October when the ceremony will be broadcast live on Front Row. English Literature has droppe...
Sep 06, 2022•42 min
David Cronenberg’s new film Crimes of the Future is a science fiction body parts horror movie starring Viggo Mortensen, Kristen Stewart and Léa Seydoux. In a time when pain no longer exists a couple are using organ removal surgery as performance art. Leila Latif reviews and gives a run down on the films being shown at this year’s Venice Film Festival, including The Whale and Banshees of Inisherin. Tom Chaplin came to fame as the lead singer of Keane. With the release of his third solo album Midp...
Sep 05, 2022•42 min
Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power is a prequel and in keeping with the epic scale of Tolkein’s books and their film versions it doesn’t begin a two years before The Hobbit but two thousand. Sci-fi novelist Temi Oh and film critic Tim Robey review the Amazon Prime series. They also consider the merits of another millennia spanning work, George Miller’s film Three Thousand Years of Longing. It’s a radical departure for the director of the Mad Max films; an adaptation of a short story by A. S. Byat...
Sep 01, 2022•42 min
Joyce Carol Oates’s latest novel, Babysitter, is the story of a woman caught in an abusive relationship with her lover, set against the background of the hunt for a serial killer in 70s Detroit. Its dark themes are not untypical of the subject matter of much of Oates’s long list of successful books which have won her great critical acclaim over the years. Tom Sutcliffe talks to her about her work and her distinctive literary style. Following the first leg of a sold-out European tour, Riopy – the...
Aug 31, 2022•42 min
Bestselling crime novelist Ann Cleeves joins Samira Ahmed to discuss the return of her no-nonsense Northumberland crime-fighter, Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope, in the Rising Tide. What gets books on the shelves of some of our biggest chain retailers? Tonight Front Row lifts the lid on the behind-the-scenes payments that influence what you get to see and buy. Composer James B.Wilson gives an insight into his writing process, ahead of the premiere of a new piece he's written for the last night...
Aug 30, 2022•42 min
The BBC Proms is celebrating what would’ve been Aretha Franklin’s 80th birthday, and leading the tribute is American singer-songwriter Sheléa. She's a protegee of Quincy Jones who also found a mentor in Stevie Wonder, and names Natalie Cole and Whitney Houston as some of her inspirations. Sheléa shares Aretha Franklin’s influences of gospel, jazz and soul, and her skills to play the piano and turn her voice to a variety of styles. She performs live in the studio and demonstrates the power of Are...
Aug 18, 2022•43 min
When Gregory Doran was appointed Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2012, his stated ambition was for the company to stage the entire canon of plays in the First Folio, the first printed collection of Shakespeare’s plays. Ten years on and having just completed his plan, with the premiere of a new production of All's Well That Ends Well, he joins Nick Ahad to reflect on the changing nature of his relationship with the Bard. Nick visits Birmingham to see the rehearsals for WASWA...
Aug 17, 2022•42 min
Anne-Marie Duff talks to Samira about her new Apple TV+ series Bad Sisters, where she plays one of five sisters who is trapped in a coercive marriage, from which her sisters plot to free her by any means necessary. Is the Horniman Museum’s decision to return their Benin Bronzes to Nigeria a watershed moment for UK museums? We speak to Errol Francis, artistic director of Culture&, Dan Hicks, author of The Brutish Museums, and Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP, who is leading an All-Party Parliamentary Gro...
Aug 16, 2022•42 min
Jacob Collier has won a Grammy Award for each of his first four albums. In fact, he has five Grammys altogether. He’s back home in London after his recent UK tour and has just brought out a new single, Never Gonna Be Alone. Jacob and his musical collaborators Lizzy McAlpine and Victoria Canal perform the song live in the Front Row studio. Following the attack on Sir Salman Rushdie at the weekend, the writer, human rights activist and PEN International president, Burhan Sönmez, considers the thre...
Aug 15, 2022•42 min
Live from Edinburgh, with a review of Alan Cumming's one man show, Burn, which sets out to update the biscuit-tin image of Robert Burns. Plus Counting & Cracking - the epic, multilingual life journey of four generations, from Sri Lanka to Australia. To review the Edinburgh International Festival performances, Kate Molleson is joined by Arusa Qureshi, writer and editor of Fest Magazine, and Alan Bissett, playwright, novelist and performer. Plus we speak to Scottish film director Charlotte Wel...
Aug 11, 2022•42 min
Both journalist Charlotte Higgins and playwright David Greig are fascinated by the Roman occupation of Britain. Higgins’s book Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, an account of her travels to the Roman remains scattered about Britain, is really about how we today relate to Roman Britain. It seems an unlikely subject for a play but Greig has adapted it for the stage and they both talk to Samira Ahmed about the project. Did the Romans bring civilisation to these islands? Were they violen...
Aug 10, 2022•42 min
Kate Molleson and guests live from Edinburgh Festival. Comedian and impressionist Matt Forde talks about capturing the essence of political figures in his show Clowns To The Left Of Me, Jokers To The Right. Mezzo Soprano Anne Sofie von Otter performs songs by Rufus Wainwright and Franz Schubert on the eve of her Edinburgh International Festival concert. Playwright Uma Nada-Rajah on her topical new farce for the National Theatre of Scotland. Exodus is about the race for political leadership and i...
Aug 09, 2022•42 min
Nope is the latest film from Oscar-winning writer-director Jordan Peele, whose breakthrough was the critically acclaimed 2017 horror Get Out. Tom Sutcliffe speaks to Jordan about reinventing genre- from black horror to sci-fi-western- and examining the exploitation of black talent in Hollywood's history. When the trombonist Peter Moore plays at the Proms next Tuesday it will be the first time that the trombone has featured as a solo instrument at the Proms in twenty years. The former Young Music...
Aug 08, 2022•42 min
Tom Sutcliffe and guest reviewers Bidisha and Amon Warmann discuss Bullet Train, starring Brad Pitt. It's a vivid mixture of comedy and violence from director David Leitch, and is based on a thriller by Japanese author, Kōtarō Isaka. We also discuss Mohsin Hamid's latest novel, The Last White Man - a fable about what happens when white people's skin begins to turn brown. Conductor Semyon Bychkov conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms in a programme of a programme of Czech and Russian m...
Aug 04, 2022•42 min
Huw Stephens reports from the National Eisteddfod of Wales in Tregaron, Ceredigion, talking to Archdruid Myrddin ap Dafydd, winner of this year’s Novel Prize Meinir Pierce Jones, and folk singer Owen Shiers. In 1965 the jury recommended that the Pulitzer Prize for Music should be awarded to the jazz composer and band-leader Duke Ellington. But he did not receive the honour. The music historian Ted Gioia has started a petition calling for him to receive it posthumously now. Carolina Eyck brings t...
Aug 04, 2022•42 min
Disabled-access ticket booking – for concerts, comedy clubs, theatre, festivals, and more. Carolyn Atkinson reports on problems with new initiatives to make access to the arts much easier for disabled people: the big delays to the National Arts Access Card, and inconsistencies in purchasing ‘companion’ tickets. Will Ashon is a novelist and non-fiction writer whose latest book, The Passengers, is a compilation of voices he recorded with 180 people he came across through chance and random methods ...
Aug 02, 2022•42 min
