Aviva Studios, a reportedly £240 million pound arts complex, has opened in Manchester with Free Your Mind, an immersive stage version of The Matrix from Oscar winning director Danny Boyle. Joining presenter Nick Ahad to discuss the arrival of the UK’s biggest new cultural venue - and its inaugural production- are playwright and critic Charlotte Keatley and architecture writer and lecturer Paul Dobraszczyk. The Chemical Brothers- AKA Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons- reflect on their 30 year journey fr...
Oct 23, 2023•42 min
Film critic Ryan Gilbey and music and club culture writer Kate Hutchinson deliver their verdict on Hackney Diamonds - the first new Rolling Stones album for 18 years – and Garth Davis’ film Foe, which is based on a sci-fi novel by Iain Reid and stars Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal. Lessons in Chemistry was 2022’s hit novel about a thwarted chemist who becomes an early TV cook. It’s now been turned into a series for Apple TV, starring Brie Larson, complete with authentic 1950s food. Chef and cookb...
Oct 19, 2023•42 min
Musical theatre legend Bonnie Langford performs Stephen Sondheim's I'm Still Here from the musical Follies, in tribute to the late composer and lyricist. The actress, singer and dancer reflects on her career from West End child star to appearing in Stephen Sondheim's Old Friends, the starry revue show running at London's Gielgud Theatre. Documentary filmmaker Maysoon Pachachi makes her feature film debut with Our River…Our Sky, set in Baghdad during the winter of 2006, three years after the US-l...
Oct 18, 2023•42 min
Two adaptations of Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco open this month, one in Belfast and a Welsh language adaptation in Cardiff. The adaptors Patrick J O’Reilly and Manon Steffan Ros both join Kathy Clugston to discuss how this 1950s play about the rise of Fascism speaks to audiences now. Singer Cara Dillon is known globally for her interpretations of traditional Irish songs. As she performs at the Belfast International Arts Festival, she explains why she’s taking a new direction with her upcoming al...
Oct 17, 2023•43 min
Madonna is still in the spotlight 45 years after bursting onto the pop scene in the 1980s, inspiring fashion, dance and youth culture, as well as being the world’s best-selling female artist of all time. Author of the biography Madonna: A Rebel Life, Mary Gabriel explores what’s behind her enduring influence and music critic Pete Paphides assesses last night’s Celebration tour performance, rescheduled after her recent serious health scare. The latest film from director Martin Scorcese focuses on...
Oct 16, 2023•43 min
Samira Ahmed is joined by critics Anne Joseph and Nancy Durrant to review some of this week’s cultural highlights. They discuss the new series of the classic TV comedy Frasier, which is returning to our screens after nearly two decades, and a new exhibition, Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style. Martin Hayes has gone from playing the fiddle in his father’s ceilidh band in County Clare to performing for President Obama at the White House. Martin brings his band, The Common Groun...
Oct 12, 2023•42 min
Actor Richard Armitage – who starred in North and South and the Hobbit - joins Nick to discuss writing his debut novel, the bio-tech thriller Geneva, which is about to be published in hardback but was originally commissioned as an audio book. Autumn 2023 has seen Opera North launching its first sustainable ‘Green Season’. This includes the world premiere of an ambitious new production, Masque of Might which repurposes the music of composer Henry Purcell in a spectacle of song and dance. We hear ...
Oct 11, 2023•42 min
Nigel Kennedy remains the best selling violinist of all time with a repertoire that spans jazz, classical, rock, klezmer and more. Ahead of his four night residency at Ronnie Scott’s in London this week, Nigel Kennedy and cellist Beata Urbanek-Kalinowska join us in the Front Row studio to perform two reworkings of pieces by Ryuichi Sakamoto and the Polish film score composer, Krzysztof Komeda. Author Christine Coulson discusses her novel ‘One Woman Show’ written entirely through the medium of ar...
Oct 10, 2023•42 min
Kathryn Tickell and The Darkening’s new album, Cloud Horizons, fuses synthesizers with a bone flute, a sistrum – very old Egyptian instrument - and lyrics based on an inscription in Latin carved on a stone in Northumberland nearly 2 millennia ago. Kathryn talks to Samira about this ancient Northumbrian futurism and plays her smallpipes, live. We remember the film director Terrence Davis, perhaps best known for the film Distant Voices, who has died aged 77. Samira spoke to him for Front Row last ...
Oct 09, 2023•42 min
The winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature is Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, who is best known for his innovative plays. Playwright Simon Stephens, who has translated his work, talks about the impact of his plays which are widely performed across Europe but little known in the UK. Front Row reviews Golda, which stars Helen Mirren as Israeli prime minster Golda Meir, and an exhibition of work by the artist Philip Guston at the Tate Modern in London. Poet Aviva Dautch and art critic Ben Lukes ...
Oct 05, 2023•42 min
Mike Skinner helped define an era with The Streets' album Original Pirate Material in 2002. Now he's back with not only new music but an accompanying film, The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light. He talks to Nick Ahad about guerrilla filming in nightclubs and the influence of Raymond Chandler. The choreographer, writer and founder of hip hop dance company ZooNation, Kate Prince, tells us about a dramaturg who has been a key influence on her. We hear about the advice and inspiration offered...
Oct 04, 2023•42 min
The actor Patsy Ferran talks to Samira about her transformation from flower girl (with some autonomy) to duchess (with none at all) in Pygmalion at the Old Vic, and a career in which she transformed from Edith, the maid in Blithe Spirit with Angela Lansbury to Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire with Paul Mescal, via Jem in Treasure Island. “Rubenesque” has long evoked a voluptuous image of female nudity in art, but a new exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery seeks to explore the comp...
Oct 03, 2023•42 min
The portraits in the National Gallery’s new retrospective of the artist Frans Hals capture his informal and fresh style which contrasted with other masters like Vermeer and Rembrandt. We hear from the exhibition’s curator Bart Cornelis and by the writer Benjamin Moser whose forthcoming book The Upside-Down World describes his lifelong passion for the art of what’s often called the Dutch Golden Age. The enthusiasm of politicians for the spectacular U-turn has reached the cultural sphere; in Scotl...
Oct 02, 2023•42 min
Front Row reviews two of this week’s cultural highlights. Tom Sutcliffe is joined by writer Hettie Judah and film critic Peter Bradshaw to discuss Happy Gas, a retrospective of work by Sarah Lucas at the Tate Britain, and The Old Oak, which director Ken Loach has said will be his final film. Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, was Front Row’s artist in (remote) residence during the lockdown, playing for us live in the empty Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik. At last Víkingur comes to the Front Ro...
Sep 28, 2023•42 min
Alan Bleasdale’s Boys From The Blackstuff is widely regarded as television drama at its best with a cultural footprint that led to the phrase “Gi’s a job” being heard up and down the country. Forty years on from the first broadcast, James Graham, known for plays such as This House, about the UK’s hung parliament of the 1970s, and Dear England about the England football team, has adapted Alan’s screenplays for a stage production at the Royal Court theatre in Liverpool. He discusses why now was th...
Sep 27, 2023•43 min
The announcement of the winners of the BBC National Short Story Award and the BBC Young Writers’ Award with Cambridge University, live from the Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House in London. Joining presenter Tom Sutcliffe to celebrate and interrogate the short story form are the broadcaster and NSSA chair of judges Reeta Chakrabarti, alongside fellow judges and writers Jessie Burton, Roddy Doyle and Okechukwu Nzelu. The shortlisted stories and authors in alphabetical order are: 'The Storm' by N...
Sep 26, 2023•42 min
As the cast of the Archers star in a new adaptation of Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford, Samira is joined by actors Louiza Patikas, who plays Helen in the Archers, and Susie Riddell, who plays Tracy, to discuss the two-part Radio 4 drama, now called Lark Rise to Ambridge. Actor and chef turned director Philip Barantini joins Samira to discuss making the sequel for BBC television to his BAFTA-nominated, one-take film, Boiling Point, set in the febrile atmosphere of a high-end restaurant k...
Sep 25, 2023•43 min
Front Row opens this year’s Contain’s Strong Language festival live in Leeds. Nick Ahad talks to Detectorists star Toby Jones about his stage adaptation of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winters Night A Traveller, to the festival poet and rapper Testament about 50 Years of Hip Hop and the choreographer and artist Katja Heitmann about turning the everyday gestures of Leeds citizens into art. Plus poetry from the newly appointed Yorkshire Young Laureate.
Sep 21, 2023•44 min
Writer Joan Smith and art historian Katy Hessel review a retrospective exhibition of the performance artist Marina Abramovic at the Royal Academy and a new ITV drama about the Yorkshire ripper, The Long Shadow. The Russian journalist, novelist and now playwright Dmitry Glukhovsky talks about his stage drama The White Factory telling the story of the ghetto in Łódź, Poland during the second world war. In it he explores the corrosive nature of compromise as the Jews are forced to choose which amon...
Sep 20, 2023•42 min
Birmingham Royal Ballet is celebrating the city’s pioneering heavy metal band in a new production, Black Sabbath – the Ballet. Tom Sutcliffe talks to the director of BRB Carlos Acosta about how the marriage of apparently conflicting cultures came about. He also hears from the composer and arranger Christopher Austin on adapting the music for contemporary choreography and the dramaturg Richard Thomas about creating a narrative structure for an abstract dance form. Today it was announced that Mich...
Sep 19, 2023•43 min
From the enduring legacy of Colin Firth’s wet shirt to the colourful extravagance of Bridgerton, costumes have always been central in period dramas. But how much does adaptation match up to reality when it comes to regency fashion? To discuss this - and what’s revealed by the closet of the real-life Austen - Samira is joined by Hilary Davidson, author of ‘Jane Austen’s Wardrobe’, and the award-winning costume designer Dinah Collin. Radio 4’s first poet-in-residence, Daljit Nagra, discusses his n...
Sep 18, 2023•42 min
When the artist Charlie Mackesy, best-known for his book The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, heard Paul Simon’s most recent album, the acclaimed Seven Psalms, he was inspired to create a sketch for each ‘psalm’. They both join us on Front Row. In the last of our interviews with all the authors shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award we talk to Kamila Shamsie about her story Churail. Gabrielle Chanel opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and Das Rheingold, the first ...
Sep 14, 2023•47 min
Katherine Rundell on her new children’s fantasy book, Impossible Creatures. It's a story of two worlds, ours and one where the animals of myth and legend still survive, and thrive. A fantasy which does not shirk from dark themes, and was inspired by the metaphysical poetry of John Donne. The next finalist in the National Short Story Award is South African writer Nick Mulgrew . His story, The Storm, is set in suburban Durban describes a toxic family dynamic against a backdrop of the dramatic and ...
Sep 13, 2023•42 min
Front Row looks at the impact of the Hollywood strikes. Film critic Leila Latif, Equity UK’s Secretary General Paul Fleming, and Lisa Holdsworth, screenwriter and Chair of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain explain the impact and the knock on effect on UK film and TV. The theme to the video game Halo has become one of the best known pieces of game music ever released. Earlier this year fans from around the world were invited to join a virtual choir of thousands to sing the iconic chant. The BBC...
Sep 12, 2023•42 min
Front Row gets an exclusive look at some of the treasures confirmed as missing by the British Museum, as art dealer, academic and whistleblower Dr Ittai Gradel, who says he bought them in good faith on eBay, returns them. Deborah Frances White, the comedian and writer behind the hit podcast The Guilty Feminist, joins Samira to discuss her debut play, Never Have I Ever. Named after the confessional drinking game, at its heart is an explosive dinner party dissecting identity politics and infidelit...
Sep 11, 2023•42 min
Presenter Samira Ahmed is joined by the broadcaster and Chair of Judges Reeta Chakrabarti to announce the shortlist of the 2023 BBC National Short Story Awards with Cambridge University. Front Row will interview each of the shortlisted authors in the coming weeks, ahead of hosting the award ceremony live from the BBC Radio Theatre on 26th September. Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen has been described as possessing “a once-in-a-generation-voice.” Samira spoke to her between performances as Elizabe...
Sep 07, 2023•42 min
Curator Karen O’Rourke, and the actor and writer Arthur Bostrom discuss Sir Ken Dodd - the man behind the the tickling stick, the Diddymen, and the new exhibition, Happiness! at the Museum of Liverpool. The Stirling Prize shortlist, the UK’s most prestigious architecture prize, was announced today. Architecture critic Oliver Wainwright and Catherine Croft, Director of the Twentieth Century Society, discuss what this year’s shortlist reveals about the state of architecture in Great Britain. When ...
Sep 06, 2023•42 min
The Architect - a play marking the 30th anniversary of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence - will take place on a double-decker bus travelling the route on which Stephen was attacked in 1993. Presenter Allan Little speaks to the director Matthew Xia and one of the playwrights, Bola Agbaje. Small independent publishers appear to be on a winning streak - last year several prestigious literary prizes were won by small presses, despite the inflationary pressures that have put some out of business....
Sep 06, 2023•42 min
Dame Anna Wintour, Global Editorial Director of Vogue, tells Samira Ahmed about Vogue World, the magazine’s fashion and performance spectacular which makes its UK debut this month at the start of London Fashion Week. You may know the early 1900s Bloomsbury Group for its art and philosophy, but the collective was also in the vanguard of sartorial revolution. In the studio to discuss its impact on fashion are writer Charlie Porter, author of Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashi...
Sep 04, 2023•42 min
Larushka Ivan-Zadeh and Mickey-Jo Boucher discuss A Mirror, a new play by Sam Holcroft about staging a drama in a country where state censorship controls the arts. It stars Trainspotting's Jonny Lee Miller. They’ll also look at Charlotte Regan’s film Scrapper about a young girl who is left living alone after her mother dies, then her father turns up. What happens next? Many will know Louis Garrel from his role as Professor Bhaer in Greta Gerwig’s film Little Women but he is also an accomplished ...
Aug 24, 2023•42 min
