Front Row

Samira talks to Steven Spielberg about his new version of the musical West Side Story, along with Ariana DeBose who plays Anita. Following the recent demolition of the Dorman Long Tower at the former steelworks in Redcar and the auction of George Harrison’s childhood home in Liverpool, we consider how working class cultural heritage is defined, valued and protected. Joining Samira in discussion ar...

Britain’s foremost writer of political drama, James Graham, has written a new play ‘Best of Enemies’, about the television debates in the US in 1968 between the right wing thinker William Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal, the left wing writer. When they began yelling at each other ratings soared - and political coverage changed. Graham talks to presenter Tom Sutcliffe about his play and the striking par...

Paolo Sorrentino’s film The Great Beauty won an Oscar. Now he has returned to his home city of Naples to make a film based on his own autobiography, The Hand of God, which shows how his passion for the footballer Maradona saved his life. At the National Gallery a new exhibition, Dürer’s Journey: Travels of a Renaissance Artist, looks at how the Nuremberg artist had links with the artistic flowerin...

Front Row is live from the 2021 Turner Prize Ceremony at Coventry Cathedral. Samira Ahmed hears from Turner Prize judges actor Russell Tovey and curator Zoe Whitley, and the director of Tate Britain Alex Farquharson, about why they chose artists' collectives for this year's shortlist. Pauline Black reflects on what it means to Coventry to host this year's Turner Prize exhibition as part of the Cit...

As the debate over the Parthenon Marbles has resurfaced in recent weeks, we take a deep dive into this decades old dispute. Alexander Herman, Assistant Director of the Institute of Art and Law joins presenter Tom Sutcliffe to provide insight and analysis. Renowned folk musician Eliza Carthy reviews Peter Jackson's Beatles documentary series Get Back. We meet the Turner Prize nominated neurodiverge...

The electronic musician Kelly Lee Owens won this year’s Welsh Music Prize for her album Inner Song. She tells Samira Ahmed about her inspiration - and her collaborations with John Cale, Björk and Michael Sheen. This evening theatres in the West End dim their lights in honour of the great composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the words for the songs in West Side Story, and the musicals...

The designer Henry Holland and writers Stephanie Merritt and Tahmima Anam review House of Gucci, The Every by Dave Eggers and Adele's new album 30. In the run up to the Turner Prize, Front Row is hearing from the artists’ collectives nominated for the award. Tonight, we hear from Array, a Belfast based collective who use their art to draw attention to social and political issues in Northern Irelan...

As her first major retrospective in the UK opens in Manchester, the distinguished American artist Suzanne Lacy discusses a career which has seen her standing at the junction of aesthetics and activism, filmmaker Camille Griffin on her Christmas comedy horror - Silent Night, and a postcard from Bishop Auckland as the town undergoes a philanthropic arts transformation. Presenter: Nick Ahad Studio En...

During the pandemic Andrew Lloyd Webber has been more of a campaigner than a composer. He talks to Samira Ahmed how to keep theatres open now, taking his show Cinderella to Broadway and his latest ambition - to write a musical about the refugee crisis. The Costa Book Awards (formerly the Whitbread) celebrate their 50th anniversary this year. Front Row announces the shortlists for the 2021 awards t...

Jane Campion is famous for The Piano and a baby grand plays a crucial role in her new film The Power of the Dog, in which Benedict Cumberbatch plays a heavy smoking, unwashed and deeply troubled rancher in 1920s Montana. Briony Hanson reviews the film for Front Row and considers the lengths to which actors will go to create a character. All the nominees for this year’s Turner Prize are artistic co...

New movie King Richard stars Will Smith and focuses on the father of Venus and Serena Williams. The Wife of Willesden is the first play by Zadie Smith. And Wheel of Time is a new fantasy series on Amazon Prime Video. Ashley Hickson-Lovence and Larushka Ivan-Zadeh join Samira to review all three. Moira Buffini on her darkly comic new state of the nation play for the National Theatre, Manor, directe...

‘A spiritual enquiry into what it is to be human’ is how Ralph Fiennes describes T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. On the eve of the opening in the West End he tells presenter Elle Osili-Wood about his stage presentation and his relationship with the poems. An exhibition that was a smash hit in Australia has come to Plymouth. “Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters” explores the ancient stories of Indig...

Céline Sciamma’s last film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, won awards worldwide after its release in 2019. Now the French filmmaker is back with Petite Maman – a meditative film set in the French countryside in which an eight year old girl, while helping her parents clear her mother’s family home, meets a mysterious girl of the same age in the woods. Less than a year since the UK emerged from lockdow...

Lin-Manuel Miranda makes his debut as film director with a cinematic retelling of the stage musical - tick, tick…Boom! The film stars Andrew Garfield as a musical theatre composer desperate to succeed in his chosen field before his 30th birthday. In the aftermath of COP 26, with progress made but pledges watered down, how should fiction respond to climate change? Omar El Akkad, journalist and auth...

Tori Amos plays live and tells presenter Tom Sutcliffe about going from rock bottom to renewal in her lockdown album conceived on the Cornish coast, Ocean to Ocean. The Courtauld Gallery in London, renowned in particular for its collection of Impressionist art, reopens after a major 3-year refurbishment. Reviewers Waldemar Januszczak and Subhadra Das join Tom to assess the refreshed setting. They’...

For many years Shetlanders with ambitions to become artists had to leave to train and work. Not any longer, and young artists are also returning to the islands. Jen Stout reports on the ancient and modern arts in Shetland. Nigerian novelist Timothy Ogene tells Kirsty about the experiences that led him to write Seesaw, his satirical novel about the transatlantic creative writing industry. Fresh fro...

The unique cultural heritage of Venice is under threat from increasingly frequent flooding and rising sea levels. Anna Somers Cocks OBE, founding editor of the Art Newspaper and Fellow of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, signed a letter appealing to the Italian Prime Minister to safeguard the city, on the eve of COP 26. She’s joined by Francesco da Mosto, Venetian architect and aut...

British filmmaker, singer-songwriter and music producer Jeymes Samuel AKA The Bullitts discusses his new film The Harder They Fall. Finnish-Estonian author Sofi Oksanen on her new novel Dog Park. Jon Gilchrist, Executive Director of Home in Manchester and incoming president of UK Theatre, on the state of regional theatre this autumn. And in the latest instalment of our series Inside the Songs, Pau...

Alan Cumming discusses his autobiography, Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life. This volume chronicles some of his career highs after Hollywood came calling, including working with Stanley Kubrick, filming with the Spice Girls and holidaying with Gore Vidal. Front Row critics Alexandra Shulman and Leila Latif review this week's cultural highlights including Diana biopic Spencer, Israeli drama V...

Shortlisted authors Anuk Arudpragasam, Damon Galgut, Patricia Lockwood, Nadifa Mohamed, Richard Powers and Maggie Shipstead join Samira Ahmed live in Broadcasting House's Radio Theatre for the announcement of the winner of the 2021 Booker Prize. Last year's winner Douglas Stuart is in conversation with HRH The Duchess of Cornwall. And 30 years on from his historic Booker win, Ben Okri reflects on...

Little Amal, a giant puppet of a refugee girl, will complete her epic journey from Gaziantep on the Turkey/Syria border to Manchester tomorrow. Theatre director David Lan discusses what the project has achieved. Euripides’ tragedy Herakles was first performed in 416BC. The poet Anne Carson’s new translation mentions contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer, an Airstream trailer and a lawnmower. The text...

Meet the anagrammatical Orbis Rex, Queen Dido, Blind Dom’nic, as they battle a wet and withered bat from Wuhan in Front Row as Armando Iannucci, Samira Ahmed’s guest, reads from and talks about Pandemonium, his new mock-heroic epic poem written in response to the Covid pandemic and the times we live in. The sights and sounds of Liverpool are evoked as Paul remembers the 1967 Beatles single Penny L...

Critics Michael Donkor and Jan Asante review actor Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut feature film Passing and the series Colin in Black and White, about former NFL player Colin Kaepernick. In the fifth of our Booker Prize Book Groups, listeners put their questions to author Richard Powers, shortlisted for the second time for his novel Bewilderment. He describes it as a story about the anxiety of fa...

Front Row visits Truro to report on the re-opening of the Hall for Cornwall after a 3 year, £26million refurbishment. The new 1300 auditorium complements the granite of the old building, and the Cornish landscape. And the opening show – the world premiere of the Fisherman’s Friends musical, of course. We hear from Matt Hemley, News Editor for The Stage, about the ongoing affect of Covid on theatre...

Patricia Lockwood is the latest author to join our Booker Prize Book Groups. Three listeners will ask her about No One Is Talking About This, a novel that’s been described as “ferociously original”, exploring a relationship with the online world and how it changes when an incredibly moving event happens in real life. The Science Museum has come in for criticism after choosing Adani Group, a compan...