Front Row

Ria Zmitrowicz talks about her role in The Power, the TV adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s novel. She plays Roxy Monke, the daughter of a notorious crime boss whose aspirations to join the family business are realized when she gains a mysterious new power. Tom Sutcliffe is joined by author Michael Arditti and critic Alexandra Coughlan review the ENO’s new production of Korngold’s opera The Dead City...

Rain Dogs, billed as ‘a love story told from the gutter,’ is a new comedy drama series starring Daisy May Cooper. Shahidha Bari is joined in the studio by the writer and creator of the series, Cash Carraway. Ahead of the BAFTA Games Awards we discuss the state of play in the UK games industry with Chris Allnutt, gaming critic for the Financial Times and with games producer Charu Desodt, whose inte...

Singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant talks to Samira Ahmed about Keep Your Courage, her first album in nearly a decade. Libraries were awarded the smallest amount of money from the Cultural Investment Fund, which was announced last week. Front Row speaks to Nick Poole, Chief Executive of CILIP, the Library and Information Association. And Victoria Adukwei Bulley discusses winning the Rathbones Folio...

Award-winning journalist Barbara Demick’s book 'Nothing to Envy' has been short-listed for this year’s Baille Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Winner of Winners Award; North Korean defectors spoke about love, family life and the terrible cost of the 1990’s famine. Front Row examines the controversy surrounding Dungeons and Dragons, the world's most popular table-top role playing game and now a Hollyw...

Writer and director Steven Knight, whose work includes Peaky Blinders and SAS Rogue Heroes, discusses his new BBC adaptation of Great Expectations which stars Olivia Coleman as Miss Havisham. Tom Sutcliffe is joined by critics Ben Luke and Isabel Stevens to review some of the week’s cultural highlights including Spanish film The Beasts, the After Impressionism exhibition at the National Gallery an...

A Tall Order! Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s is the name of the show currently on at Touchstones Rochdale, which reflects on the gallery’s radical history supporting those who were, at the time, overlooked by the mainstream of the art world, some of whom have gone on to prestigious careers. Co-curators Derek Horton and Alice Correia join Front Row to discuss the show. We begin our interviews wi...

Are theatre audiences behaving badly? After recent complaints, we discuss expectations of audience etiquette. Tom is joined by: Dr Kirsty Sedgman, Lecturer in Theatre at University of Bristol, researcher of audiences, and author of The Reasonable Audience: Theatre Etiquette, Behaviour Policing, And The Live Performance Experience; Lyn Gardner, theatre critic and Associate Editor of The Stage; and...

Irish singer songwriter Lisa O’Neill talks to Samira Ahmed about her latest album, All Of This Is Chance, and performs live in the Front Row studio. The National Theatre of Norway have brought their production of Strindberg’s Dance of Death to the UK. Director Marit Moum Aune explains what led her to delve into the work of Strindberg, and acclaimed Norwegian actor Pia Tjelta reveals how she connec...

Richard Eyre on directing the screen version of Alan Bennett’s play Allelujah, starring Jennifer Saunders, set on the geriatric ward of a fictional Yorkshire hospital, the Bethlehem, and on raising questions about how society cares for its older population. We review the star-studded Apple TV+ climate change series Extrapolations, and a new exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, Souls Grown De...

Filmmaker Hassan Nazar talks to Kate Molleson about his new film Winners, a love letter to the art of cinema. Set in Iran, it follows two children who find an Oscars statuette. Playwright Calum L MacLeòid on his new Western, Stornaway, Quebec, which is set in 1880s Canada and performed in Gaelic, Québécois, and English. And to mark Neurodiversity Celebration Week, Front Row discusses neurodiversit...

The conclusion of the Oscars marks the end of the film awards season, so Front Row took the opportunity to look at the progress made on representation in film and at awards. Tom is joined by the film critic Amon Warmann, Katherine Pieper of LA's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which looks at equalities at the Oscars, and Marcus Ryder of the Lenny Henry Centre For Media Diversity. Plus, with a host...

Author Percival Everett on his novel Dr No; Director Pravesh Kumar on his film Little English; the new Yeats Smartphones poetry trail in Bedford Award-winning US novelist Percival Everett on his surreal new book, Dr No – in which unlikely heroes and uber-wealthy super villains chase after a box containing absolutely nothing. Pravesh Kumar has been running a theatre company for over two decades and...

New Irish film, My Sailor, My Love, by Finnish director, Klaus Härö, and a new collection of short stories, Old Babes in the Wood, by Margaret Atwood. To review, Tom is joined by author Ashley Hickson-Lovence and academic Sarah Churchwell. Plus the Baillie Gifford prize – the six books shortlisted for the ‘winner of winners’ award. And Irish author Nicole Flattery on her debut novel Nothing Specia...

A reimagining of Caryl Churchill’s ground-breaking and celebrated play, Top Girls, opens this week at the Liverpool Everyman which sets the play – about female ambition and success across centuries and cultures - in Merseyside. Playwright Charlotte Keatley and theatre critic Susannah Clapp discuss the play’s themes and its continuing impact forty years after its premiere. Prince Harry’s book Spare...

Daniel Mays talks to Samira Ahmed about starring as Nathan Detroit in a new immersive production of the musical Guys and Dolls at the Bridge Theatre in south London. Front Row investigates how accessible theatres and gig venues are, not just for audiences but for performers. Reporter Carolyn Atkinson talks to a comedian and a DJ who have struggled with access and asks how venues should be addressi...

Sherlock and Dr Who writer Steven Moffat, and Lucy Caldwell, winner of the BBC National Short Story Award, discuss writing short stories inspired by the science of the Large Hadron Collider for a new collection called Collision. The project pairs a team of award-winning authors with Cern physicists to explore some of the discoveries being made, through fiction. From interstellar travel using quant...

Riley Keough and Sam Claflin star in the 10-part adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel Daisy Jones And The Six, the story of a fictional 70s band loosely inspired by Fleetwood Mac. Belgian director Lukas Dhont’s film Close, about two teenage boys whose close friendship is challenged by their schoolmates, won the Grand Prix at Cannes. Critics Tim Robey and Kate Mossman join Front Row to review...

On St David's Day Front Row is coming from Cardiff with Huw Stephens bringing the latest arts and culture stories of Wales. Welsh National Opera’s latest production is Blaze of Glory. The librettist Emma Jenkins and composer David Hackbridge Johnson talk to Huw Stephens about their new opera. Set in a Welsh Valleys’ village in the 1950s, it follows the a group of miners who raise spirits following...

Tracy-Ann Oberman on playing a female Shylock in the RSC's new 1936 version of The Merchant Of Venice at Watford Palace Theatre. As the Oldham Coliseum is forced to close at the end of March, reporter Charlotte Green updates the story of the diversion of Arts Council funding from the theatre to the local council. Actor Michael B Jordan tells Samira about making his directorial debut with Creed III...

Conductor Sir Antonio Pappano tells us about his two new versions of Puccini’s opera, Turandot – a revival on stage at the Royal Opera House, and a new recording with tenor Jonas Kaufman, soprano Sondra Radvanovsky and the Orchestra dell’ Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. A year on from the invasion of Ukraine, Luke Jones hears from some of the Ukrainian performers living and working in exile....

Reviews of the new immersive show David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) at Lightroom in London and Korean film Broker, with Larushka Ivan Zadeh and Ekow Eshun. Installation artist Mike Nelson on the art in his new retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London and the challenge of reconstructing such epic work. Plus AI writing. Neil Clarke, Editor of The American scie...

Nathaniel Martello-White on making his directorial debut with the psychological thriller The Strays, set between a south London estate and an affluent English suburb. Chila Kumari Singh Burman’s show at FACT in Liverpool, Merseyside Burman Empire, references her MBE for services to Visual Art, awarded last year in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, and her experiences growing up in Bootle as the daught...

Hollywood star Michael Douglas talks about his double-Oscar winning movie career, how he’s still learning the craft of acting and about his new film, Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, which is in cinemas now. As the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine approaches, we hear from two artists working in the country under conflict - Oksana Taranenko, director of the opera Kateryna in O...

Hugh Jackman talks to Samira Ahmed about his role in Florian Zeller's new film The Son, in which he plays a father struggling with his child’s mental health issues. Kevin Jared Hosein, who won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2018, talks about his first novel for adults. Hungry Ghosts tells the stories of the marginalised Hindu people of Trinidad, focusing on a family who, close by a luxuriou...

On today's Front Row, Samira Ahmed talks to stand-up comedian Al Murray about putting the puppets of the political satire TV show Spitting Image on stage for the first time, in a new production, Spitting Image - Idiots Assemble, at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. And she discusses the Oscar and Bafta-nominated animation Marcel The Shell With Shoes On, and a new exhibition of work by the American...