Front Row

Samira Ahmed talks to Priya Khanchandani, the curator of The Offbeat Sari, an exhibition of contemporary saris at the Design Museum in London. The art critic Louisa Buck and the journalist James Marriott consider the vexed politics of museum labels. Mat Osman, bass player with the band Suede, joins Samira to discuss his new novel, The Ghost Theatre, which dramatises the lives of boy actors in 1601...

Brokeback Mountain on stage: musician and librettist Dan Gillespie Sells discusses writing the songs for a new stage production of Brokeback Mountain, adapted from Annie Proulx’s short story about the romance between two men working as sheep herders in 1960s Wyoming. Venice Architecture Biennale: the exhibition at the British Pavilion this year draws on traditions practised by different diaspora c...

In 2021, June Givanni was presented with the British Independent Film Awards Special Jury Prize for what was described as “an extraordinary, selfless and lifelong contribution to documenting a pivotal period of film history” with her extensive archive focussed on African and African diaspora cinema. The archive is now the subject of a new exhibition - PerAnkh: The June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Ar...

Louise Kennedy's debut novel Trespasses has been shortlisted for this year's Women's Prize for Fiction. Set in Belfast in 1975 at the height of the Troubles it traces the love affair between a young Catholic schoolteacher and an older man, a married Protestant barrister. Front Row will be talking to the authors on the shortlist in the weeks before the announcement of the prize on June 14th. Musici...

Samira Ahmed speaks to John Cook, Professor of Media at Glasgow Caledonian University about his discovery of a previously unknown early version of the seminal screenplay The Singing Detective by Dennis Potter. Samira is also joined in the studio by Ken Trodd, who co-produced The Singing Detective for television. Music writer Cathi Unsworth discusses her new book, Season of the Witch: The Book of G...

Recorded at the Hornby Library inside Liverpool Central Library, in front of a live audience, as Liverpool gears up to host The Eurovision Song Contest on behalf of Ukraine. Two novelists from The Big Eurovision Read, a list of 12 books from The Reading Agency and BBC Arts talk to Nick Ahad about the unifying power of music: Pete Paphides on his autobiography Broken Greek, A story of chip shops an...

Merseyside-native Jonathan Harvey discusses his new play, A Thong For Europe, which combines his love of Liverpool with his passion for Eurovision to create an exuberant comedy where the Eurovision final really does become a family affair. And this week our panel of cultural critics review two debuts - Academy Award-winning actor Tom Hanks’s first novel The Making of Another Major Motion Picture M...

Jack Thorne talks about his new play, The Motive and the Cue, which is about John Gielgud directing Richard Burton in a 1960s production of Hamlet on Broadway. He discusses the relationship between the two famous figures in the world of stage and screen. Composers Debbie Wiseman and Sarah Glass, who have both been commissioned to write music for the King’s Coronation, discuss composing for a landm...

Sir Lenny Henry is making his debut as a playwright for the stage with August in England, a one-man drama about the Windrush scandal. Tom Sutcliffe meets Lenny to discuss his move from stage to page and back again, as he takes on the title role of August at The Bush Theatre in London. 50 years ago, after the Chinese invasion of Tibet, the ancient Tashi Lhunpo Monastery relocated to South India, wh...

Samira celebrates the music and life of Sergei Rachmaninoff. With pianist Kirill Gerstein, who has released a new recording of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic, Marina Frolova-Walker, Professor of Music at Cambridge, pianist Lucy Parham, who has created a Composer Portrait concert about Rachmaninoff that she is currently touring across the UK. Plus film historian a...

Patrick Bringley sought solace after the death of his brother and found it as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where he worked for ten years. He joins Front Row to talk about his memoir of that time, All the Beauty in the World. Novelist Tahmima Anam and film critic Jason Solomons review the Russo Brothers' new spy thriller series Citadel starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Sta...

A special edition following the Royal Shakespeare’s Company’s new production of Cymbeline, the final play in Shakespeare’s First Folio - a collection that reaches its 400th anniversary this year. Acclaimed and award-winning Shakespearean, Greg Doran, has directed every play in the First Folio except Cymbeline. For him it’s one of Shakespeare’s most complex creations and he will be directing it for...

The playwright Ryan Calais Cameron's critically acclaimed play For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy has just transferred to London's West End. Samira Ahmed talks to him about its success and his new play at The Kiln in London, Retrograde, set in 1950s Hollywood and following a young Sidney Poitier. Stewart Copeland, founder member and drummer of The Police, now a...

Patrick Radden Keefe, who has been shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize of Prizes award, discusses his book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty. It tells the shocking story of the Sackler family and the part their company, Purdue Pharma, played in America's opioid crisis. “The word ‘divine’,” Iestyn Davies says, ”has changed its meaning to indicate nowadays beauty as wel...

Tom Sutcliffe meets Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt of Everything But the Girl as they release Fuse, their eleventh studio album and their first in almost 24 years following 1999’s Temperamental. Today's critics are Briony Hanson, Director of Film at the British Council and Carne Ross, former British diplomat and writer. They'll be talking about The Diplomat on Netflix which follows the story of the new...

Composer Jeanine Tesori's Blue for the ENO; Baillie Gifford winner of winners for non-fiction shortlist - Margaret MacMillan; new ideas in architecture discussed Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Jerome Weatherald

Plans to finish Barcelona’s famous church, La Sagrada Família, have been causing controversy as they involve demolishing apartment blocks to make way for the new entrance. Journalist Guy Hedgecoe, who reports on Spain for the BBC, and the Twentieth Century Society’s director, Catherine Croft, discuss the issues raised as the completion of the emblematic building draws near. Singer Georgia Cecile t...

Percussionist Colin Currie performs live in the Front Row studio. He discusses his new interpretation of one of minimalist composer Steve Reich’s best known works, Music for 18 Musicians. 50 years on from the death of playwright Noel Coward, biographer Oliver Soden and theatre director Michael Longhurst look at his legacy and ask what he means to theatre audiences today, as a new production of Cow...

The RSC's production of Hamnet brings the bestselling, award-winning novel by Maggie O'Farrell to the stage. To review this reinterpretation of O'Farrell's imagined account of the short life of Shakespeare's son, which also foregrounds his wife Agnes, Tom Sutcliffe is joined by theatre critic Susannah Clapp and the novelist and screenwriter Louise Doughty. Michael Frayn is the author of almost 50...

Screenwriter Kevin Sampson on the complexities of his new true crime drama for ITV, The Hunt for Raoul Moat. Max Porter found huge success with his first book, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, acclaimed as a tender, funny and original story of loss. His latest, Shy, completes the trilogy about grief that began with that book. It tells the story of a teenage boy in the 90s, setting off in the midd...

A new exhibition of the Pre-Raphaelite Rossettis at Tate Britain in London explores the 'radicalism' of Dante Gabriel, Christina and Elizabeth (Siddal), and their 'revolutionary' approach to life, love and art in Victorian Britain. It emphasises Elizabeth as artist rather than muse, and charts the emergence of the Pre-Raphaelites through to Gabriel’s famous romanticised female portraits. However,...

Front Row marks the 400th anniversary year of Shakespeare's First Folio with former RSC Artistic Director Greg Doran, Guildhall Principal Librarian Peter Ross, and Shakespeare experts Emma Smith, Farah Karim-Cooper and Chris Laoutaris. Without the Folio we might not have had The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure and many others. Front Row considers the rich, complicated and sometimes par...

Ai Weiwei: Making Sense. We look at the new exhibition which opens at the Design Museum in London tomorrow. Plus we review the new Grease prequel Rise of the Pink Ladies, streaming on Paramount+ from tomorrow. Samira is joined by reviewers Nancy Durrant, Cultural Editor of the Evening Standard, and critic Karen Krizanovich. Plus 25 years of the Good Friday Agreement. Two very different new plays m...

For his latest project, the Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney has turned his attention to the original tennis wunderkind Boris Becker. He talks about the making of his documentary, Boom! Boom!: The World vs Boris Becker, and what it was like to follow the sports legend during the period which saw him land in jail. The BBC's Kathy Clugston looks at how artists are commemorating the 25th anniversa...

BAFTA-winning director Joe Pearlman talks about his new Netflix documentary on Scottish pop superstar Lewis Capaldi, which is out tomorrow. In Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now, Joe follows Lewis as he struggles with his mental health and writing his second album during the pandemic. Tartan, the textile of tradition and rebellion is celebrated at the Victoria & Albert Museum in Dundee, which...