This week sees the release of the much anticipated Dune part 2, the sequel to 2021’s part 1, a series based on Frank Herbert’s 1960’s sci fi classic. We also look at Marius von Mayenburg’s play Nachtland directed by Patrick Marber at the Young Vic in London and Angelica Kauffman: the Swiss artist finally gets a solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, more than 250 years after she was one of its founding members. Seán Williams and Sam Marlowe review. Plus, the 'unofficial poet Laureate of T...
Feb 29, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kate Molleson talks to Kaouther Ben Hania about her Oscar-nominated documentary Four Daughters, which explores the impact of two sisters fleeing to join Islamic State, by bringing in actors to play them alongside the rest of their family in Tunisia. We look at two new plays about British composer Benjamin Britten and the light they shed on a life shrouded with mystery and controversy. Kate is joined by Erica Whyman, the director of Ben and Imo by Mark Ravenhill, which is on at the Royal Shakespe...
Feb 28, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Channel 4’s new reality TV series, The Jury: Murder Trial features a real-life murder case, re-run in front of two juries who are unaware of each other’s existence. Its creator Ed Kellie and BBC News' former legal affairs correspondent Clive Coleman discuss what the TV experiment tells us about how emotions can be swayed in the courtroom - and whether the juries will reach the same verdict. Susannah Gibson’s new book “Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement” explores the often overlooked femal...
Feb 27, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast In an exclusive for Front Row, Sheridan Smith performs Magic, a song from her new musical Opening Night, which is directed by Ivo Van Hove, with music from Rufus Wainwright. They discuss creating the new musical, which is based on the 1970s film and follows an actress going through a breakdown as she prepares to open a new show on Broadway. Journalist Agnes Poirier on the French film awards the Cesars, and why they were overshadowed by allegations of male directors sexually abusing young female ...
Feb 26, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Minority report, the Sci-Fi classic by Philip K Dick, has already been adapted for film and television and now it’s a stage play that employs an innovative mix of technology, stagecraft and live performance. As it opens at the Nottingham Playhouse, Mark Burman talks to some of the creatives involved. We review Wicked Little Letters, a black comedy starring Olivia Coleman and Jessie Buckley about a real-life poison pen letter writing campaign that scandalised a small seaside town in Sussex in 192...
Feb 22, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Wim Wenders on his new Oscar nominated Japanese language film Perfect Days, about a toilet cleaner in Tokyo as he goes about his work. Koji Yakusho won the Best Actor Award when the film premiered at this year’s Cannes film festival, and the film has been dubbed ‘slow cinema’. Len Pennie came to prominence as a poet on social media during the Covid pandemic. As she publishes her first collection, Poyums, the feminist performance poet talks about writing predominantly in the Scots language. Angus...
Feb 21, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rhiannon Giddens, the musician, composer and former lead singer of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, performs live with her band. She talks about her work in uncovering the real history of the banjo and writing her first solo album of original material. Peter Sarsgaard discusses playing a man with early onset dementia in Memory, a performance that won him the Best Actor Award at last year’s Venice Film Festival. What is the role of a casting director? As the BBC launches Bring the Drama, a new progr...
Feb 20, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sir Peter Blake is famous for his Pop Art paintings, collages and album covers – and not just Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. But the artist, now 91, has throughout his career made three dimensional works. For the first time in two decades there is an exhibition devoted to these. Samira Ahmed meets the artist in the gallery on the eve of the opening of Peter Blake: Sculpture and Other Matters. Actor David Harewood is appointed the new President of RADA – the Royal Academy for the Dramatic...
Feb 19, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The writer of Line of Duty, Jed Mercurio, a former doctor, turns his attention to the impact of the Covid pandemic on NHS staff and patients in the ITV drama Breathtaking. Tom Sutcliffe talks to him and co-writer Prasanna Puwanarajah, who’s also an ex-doctor, about the power of drama depicting recent events. The Arts Council England has come in for criticism for new guidance about “overtly political” art, guidelines that some artists felt could amount to censorship. Darren Henley, the Chief Exec...
Feb 15, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Andrew Harding on the Radio 4 drama, A Small Stubborn Town, inspired by his work as the BBC Ukraine correspondent Emma Rice is one the UK’s most celebrated theatre-makers known for her musical and comedic approach, and with numerous innovative and successful productions such as Brief Encounter, The Red Shoes, and Tristan and Yseult, under her belt. As her latest production goes on a UK tour, she talks to Nick about reimagining that darkest of fairy tales, Blue Beard, as a feminist cri de coeur. ...
Feb 14, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Stephen Sanchez found fame on Tik Tok, bringing his 1950s inspired music and style to an audience of young fans. At just 20 years old, he was Elton John’s guest on the main stage at Glastonbury. He talks to Samira Ahmed about his UK tour and performs two songs from his new album, Angel Face. What do Gen Z’s viewing habits mean for the future of TV and film? Dr Antonia Ward, Chief Futurist at Stylus, and Entertainment Reporter Palmer Haasch explain how the preferences of younger viewers are shapi...
Feb 13, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Director Reinaldo Marcus Green talks to Tom Sutcliffe about One Love, his biopic about the legendary reggae singer-songwriter Bob Marley and his music. Bryce Dessner, the guitarist of the award-winning rock band The National, discusses his other life in classical music and writing a new concerto for pianist Alice Sara Ott, which is having its UK premiere at the Royal Festival Hall. This week the liturgical calendar marks the moment when Joseph was warned by an angel of King Herod’s intent to har...
Feb 12, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tom Sutcliffe talks to the Evening Standard’s Arts Editor Nancy Durrant and art historian and curator Catherine McCormack about a new adaptation of David Nicholls’s book, One Day, which is released on Netflix today. It follows Emma and Dexter who meet at their graduation in Edinburgh in the late 80s, as they weave in and out of each other’s lives. They also discuss Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction, a new exhibition featuring the work of women artists who pushed at the boundaries of art-making i...
Feb 08, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Chosen, a self-funded TV drama about the life of Christ, has become an international hit with over 100 million views. The creator Dallas Jenkins explains why he wanted to make a bingeable series about Jesus and Priest Lucy Winkett and historian Joan Taylor discuss its impact and significance. The 1970s Soul Funk band Cymande has had a lasting influence on music globally, but they are little known in the UK where they first formed. Director Tim McKenzie Smith explored their music and impact i...
Feb 07, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Reytons' second album, What's Rock and Roll, debuted at No 1 in the charts - a rare feat for a band without a label. They discuss following it up with Ballad of a Bystander which features songs about pulling and politics. Phoebe Eclair-Powell on her Bruntwood Prize-winning play, Shed: Exploded View, which was inspired by the work of art Cornelia Parker created when she asked the British Army to blow up a garden shed, capturing the fragments in a frozen moment. The play centres on three coupl...
Feb 06, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Oscar-winning director and artist Steve McQueen has collaborated with his partner, the writer and historian Bianca Stigter, to document the hidden histories of World War Two beneath the streets of modern day Amsterdam. The couple join Samira to discuss their mesmerising and poetic new film. Mojo brought him great success when he was just 26. Later came Jerusalem, the greatest play of the 20th century in the Daily Telegraph theatre critic’s opinion. Then, The Ferryman, also highly acclaimed. He h...
Feb 05, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today the British Museum unveils a new exhibition – Legion: Life in the Roman Army – on the lives of soldiers who helped conquer more than a million square miles of land, settling in communities from Scotland to the Red Sea. Elodie Harper – author of the Wolf Den trilogy - and critic Amon Warmann give their verdict on the exhibition as well as the new Amazon Prime spy comedy Mr & Mrs Smith - and how it compares with the 2005 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie film version. And Tom Sutcliffe talks ...
Feb 01, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Award-winning actress Lily Gladstone on working with Martin Scorsese and Native American representation in his new film Killers of the Flower Moon. Leo Vardiashvili chats about his new book set in his hometown of Tbilisi, Georgia in the post-Soviet era. Curators William Butler and Roger Kershaw talk about their new exhibition, 'Great Escapes: Remarkable Second World War Captives' at the National Archives at Kew. It explores not just the creativity involved in physically getting away from prison ...
Jan 31, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Smile is a trio comprising Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner. That Yorke and Greenwood are members of Radiohead assures keen interest the band. Nick Ahad talks to Jonny Greenwood about Wall of Eyes, The Smile’s second album. After many years Greenwood still enjoys making music with Yorke, and drummer Tom Skinner adds to the excitement. The winner of this year’s Artes Mundi prize, the UK’s leading international contemporary art prize is Taloi Havinian, an artist from the Autonomous ...
Jan 30, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, who have been married for close to thirty years, talk to Tom Sutcliffe about playing three couples on stage in Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite. They’re joined by director John Benjamin Hickey to explain why they wanted to bring this very New York show to London’s West End. Having won both awards and praise for his short stories, Colin Barrett discusses his funny and thrilling first novel Wild Houses, set in the margins rural Ireland. Welsh musician, composer,...
Jan 29, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Color Purple reviewed, and the pop concert as cinema phenomenon.
Jan 25, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Masters of the Air creator John Orloff, Literary spin offs from film and TV with Ronan Bennet and Robert Lautner, and when does a hobby turn into art? with Miriam Elia and Hetain Patel. Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Corinna Jones
Jan 24, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Following today’s announcement of the 2024 Oscar nominations, film critic Larushka Ivan-Zadeh joins Front Row to consider how well this year’s shortlisted categories reflect the year in cinema. In Howard Jacobson’s new novel, What Will Survive of Us, nothing much happens but everything changes. Lily and Sam, in middle age and longstanding relationships – with other people - fall in love, then stay that way for years and years. The Booker Prize winning author talks to Shahidha Bari about love, se...
Jan 23, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Andrew Haigh’s new film All of Us Strangers, is both a love story and a ghost story. Starring Andrew Scott, it explores the impact of a chance encounter in a deserted tower block, and how nostalgia draws him back to the suburban family home where his parents appear to be living, just as they were on the day they died, 30 years ago. Tom Hibbert was a popular music journalist who wrote for Smash Hits, Q and many other top magazines in the 1980s and 90s and whose irreverent style of writing would i...
Jan 22, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Actor Paul Giamatti and director Alexander Payne on The Holdovers, their award-winning film about the unlikely friendship between a curmudgeonly teacher, a grieving mum and a troubled teen that forms when they’re stuck together over Christmas at a New England prep school. Critics Stephanie Merritt and Max Liu review a new novel, The Vulnerables, by Sigrid Nunez. Nunez has won many prizes for her fiction and in The Vulnerables turns her attention to the pandemic through a tale that focuses on a w...
Jan 18, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Daniel Kaluuya on making his debut as a director and screenwriter with his new film, Kitchen - a dystopian thriller set in London twenty years from now. Dafydd Rhys, Chief Executive of the Arts Council of Wales, on the surprising and controversial decision to stop funding National Theatre Wales. Plus, as his organisation faces a 10% budget cut, he talks about the impact on the creative sector in Wales. Late last year, the decision by Warner Bros. to shelve a $70 million film which had been compl...
Jan 17, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos talk about their award-winning film Poor Things, based on Alasdair Gray’s novel Jodie Comer is a new mother struggling to survive after an environmental catastrophe in another new film The End We Start From – Samira Ahmed talks to its director Mahalia Belo. The new joint artistic directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company Tamara Harvey and Daniel Evans have announced their inaugural season of productions – including a stage version of Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Su...
Jan 16, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast British director Jonathan Glazer tells Tom Sutcliffe about The Zone of Interest, his award-winning new film about Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höss and family’s involvement in the Holocaust which is on wide release from February 2nd but there's previews in select cities on January 20th. Today is exactly 100 years since the BBC broadcast what is widely believed to be the first play for radio, A Comedy of Danger, set in a Welsh Coalmine. Ron Hutchinson has written an audio drama telling the story b...
Jan 15, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mean Girls is 20 years old and has its cult following - but will fans love the new film of the hit Broadway musical of the same name? Critics Sarah Ditum and Ashley Hickson-Lovence give their verdict on the new version. They also discuss with Tom Sutcliffe the new novel by Hisham Matar - My Friends, which explores themes of friendship and exile, as well as including real-life events like the shooting of WPC Yvonne Fletcher outside the Libyan Embassy in 1984 and the killing of General Gadaafi in ...
Jan 11, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jack Rooke drew on his own life for his hit Channel 4 sitcom Big Boys which focussed on an unlikely friendship between two first year university students – both working class with one struggling to explore his gay sexuality and the other an apparent Jack-the-lad who is really anything but. As Big Boys returns for a second series, he talks to Samira about making comedy out of loss, mental health, and male friendship. Musician Eliza Carthy is Front Row’s wassail Queen as she sings live on the prog...
Jan 10, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
