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
Authors Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché are live in the studio to discuss their new queer sci-fi thriller Prophet. Theatre director Wils Wilson has invited the comedian Stewart Lee to rewrite the Porter’s scene in a new RSC production of Macbeth. Wils and Stewart join Samira Ahmed to discuss drawing on stand-up comedy, pantomime and the politics of today to refresh Shakespeare's comic relief. And we rediscover the American singer-songwriter Connie Converse, fifty years after she disappeared witho...
Aug 23, 2023•42 min
Author Louise Doughty talks to Samira Ahmed about her new novel, A Bird in Winter. A fast-paced thriller set in the world of espionage, it follows a woman on the run who must work out who is on her trail. This summer for the first time British Sign Language interpretations were streamed live for all acts on the Glastonbury Pyramid Stage. Samira speaks to professional BSL music performance interpreters Stephanie Raper - who has signed for Stormzy and Eminem - and @Fletch, who is deaf and has sign...
Aug 22, 2023•42 min
Musician Corinne Bailey Rae performs live in the studio and discusses the inspiration for her new album, Black Rainbows. Writer Peter Arnott on his new play about the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum, Group Portrait In A Summer Landscape, opening at Pitlochry Festival Theatre on Friday. Plus short stories: critics Stephanie Merritt and Suzi Feay on two new collections - by Kate Atkinson and by US 'flash fiction' writer Diane Williams. Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Emma Wallace...
Aug 21, 2023•43 min
A review of two of the big shows at this year’s Edinburgh Festival: Olivier award-winning writer Isobel McArthur has had great success with her genre-busting works Pride and Prejudice* (*Sort Of) and Kidnapped. Her latest play The Grand Old Opera House Hotel is a rom-com set in a haunted house filled with opera arias – it’s worlds apart from Funeral, a calm, interactive meditation on the nature of life and death by the Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed. Our reviewers give their verdicts on...
Aug 17, 2023•42 min
As the acclaimed 1976 Roman Empire drama series I Claudius returns to television screens, classicist Natalie Haynes and cultural critic Charlotte Higgins discuss the reasons for its success, whether its historical inaccuracies are any bar to its enjoyment, and if it stands the test of time. Plus conductor, curator, and composer Jules Buckley discusses his Stevie Wonder Prom celebrating 50 years of the ground-breaking album Innervisions. And why is it often so hard to buy tickets for big gigs, li...
Aug 16, 2023•43 min
Front Row is live from Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh for festival season, presented by Kate Molleson. Scotland’s own Grammy award-winning violinist Nicola Benedetti will be with us to share her vision for this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, as she makes her debut as Festival Director. Kate will also be joined on stage by the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Colson Whitehead to discuss Crook Manifesto, the latest instalment in his Harlem saga, set in 1970s New York. We’ll have music from th...
Aug 15, 2023•42 min
As the death toll from wildfires in Hawaii rises, The Beekeeper of Aleppo author Christy Lefteri explains how similar tragedies in Greece inspired her new novel The Book of Fire. Battersea Arts Centre’s Artistic Director and CEO Tarek Iskander, critic Andrzej Lukowski and theatre consultant Amanda Parker discuss what could be behind the current exodus of artistic directors from theatres across the UK. Curator Rachel Dedman and artist Aya Haider reflect on the roots of the striking needlework in ...
Aug 14, 2023•42 min
György Ligeti: on the 100th anniversary of his birth, we celebrate the Hungarian-Austrian composer and the 2023 Proms performances of his work - music which was famously used by filmmaker Stanley Kubrick in The Shining and A Space Odyssey. Pianist Danny Driver, and music critic, author and librettist Jessica Duchen join Tom to discuss. Plus we review La Cage Aux Folles - the musical story of a gay couple running a drag nightclub, and new Italian film L'immensita, starring Penelope Cruz - about a...
Aug 10, 2023•42 min
Mercury Prize winning and Oscar-nominated artist Anohni returns with a soulful new album, My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, released under the moniker Anonhi and the Johnsons for the first time. The artist Michael Moebius is preparing to launch another legal battle to protect his intellectual property, after successfully suing 399 companies for infringing his copyright in a landmark lawsuit. To discuss why artists and designers need better protection, Nick Ahad is joined by US lawyer Jeff G...
Aug 09, 2023•42 min
On the 50th anniversary of the release of the martial arts film Enter The Dragon, actor and filmmaker Daniel York Loh and Bruce Lee’s biographer Matthew Polly discuss the star of the film, Bruce Lee, and his continuing influence across culture. As reality TV remains a staple of our television schedules, Carolyn Atkinson reports on the work that television production companies are now doing to support the mental wellbeing of the members of the public who become contestants on their shows. The aut...
Aug 08, 2023•42 min
When you fall in love how do you know it’s for real, and not just the result of chemicals in your brain? Lucy Prebble’s play The Effect is back at the National Theatre - Tristan and Connie fall in love during a clinical trial for a new antidepressant and wonder if their passion is merely drug-fuelled. The Welsh band Adwaith play their online hit Fel I Fod (How To Be) – just before the Camarthen band appear at the National Eisteddfod. And could it be true that the art of criticism is dying? Theat...
Aug 07, 2023•42 min
