Front Row

American documentary photographer and President of the Magnum Foundation Susan Meiselas speaks about her fifty-year career, as she receives the Outstanding Contribution to Photography award at the Sony World Photography Awards 2025, and as her work goes on display at Somerset House in London. We hear how President Trump's economic tariffs are affecting specialist manufacturers of musical instrumen...

Director and Screenwriter PJ Hogan, creator of the 1994 comedy Muriel's wedding, speaks to Samira Ahmed about the new musical adaptation of his film. With lead actors leaving, and ratings down, there are questions about the future of Doctor Who. Author John Higgs, and entertainment writer Caroline Frost, talk about the past, present and future of the world famous Time Lord. And Anthony Horowitz ta...

Classics professor Edith Hall and writer Lawrence Norfolk join Tom to review The Return, a retelling of the end of Homer’s Odyssey, where the hero Odysseus returns to his kingdom decades after the battle of Troy to find his wife Queen Penelope fending off suitors out to take his throne. The film stars Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche talk to Tom about being reunited on screen for the first time...

Singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman talks about the re-release of her eponymous debut album after 35 years, about how those songs of oppression and aspiration, written so long ago, speak to us today, and about going from almost unknown to world famous in one performance. We ask two directors of productions of The Crucible (by Scottish Ballet, and at Shakespeare's Globe) why there is an Arthur Miller m...

Kym Marsh on stepping into the iconic role of Beverly in theatre classic Abigail's Party as the play opens at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. Film critic Hannah Strong and George Pundek, co-host of the Pulp Kitchen film podcast, on why so many of the big film franchises are facing difficulties. Severance creator Dan Erickson on making a television hit with his debut project. Novelist Max...

Theatre director Robert Icke's production of Oedipus won best revival and a best actress award for Lesley Manville at last night's Olivier Awards - but his new play Manhunt is now demanding his attention at the Royal Court Theatre in London. The drama focuses on the story of Raoul Moat who attacked his ex-girlfriend and killed her new boyfriend before a stand-off with armed police which ended in h...

Nancy Durrant and Jason Solomons join Tom to review: The new offering from Guy Ritchie, Mobland, with familiar themes of drug gangs and violence and starring Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, Tom Hardy, amongst others. Giuseppe Penone's Thoughts in the Roots exhibition which is in and outside the Serpentine gallery, expanding on the significance of trees as a recurring motif in his work. The Most Prec...

Tilda Swinton talks about her role in Joshua Oppenheimer's post-apocalyptic musical film The End, and about her intention to take a break from acting, Actor and artistic director of the new Welsh National Theatre Michael Sheen, and screenwriter Russell T Davies reveal plans for the company's first season. Plus we discuss the influence of schoolmaster Philip Burton on the legendary actor Richard Bu...

Charlie Brooker talks about the return of his wildly popular tech and sci-fi dystopian drama Black Mirror. This new six-part series includes Paul Giamatti as a man using AI to reconnect to a lost love who has died, Emma Corrin as a digitally recreated 40s screen star and, for the first time, follow-up episodes of two of the show's most popular episodes: Bandersnatch and USS Callister. The Design C...

Front Row looks at freedom of expression in the arts. From rows about cancel culture to allegations of censorship and the charge that the arts has become 'woke', we explore what is happening. Samira is joined by art curator, Ekow Eshun, novelist Philip Hensher, poet and author of Hounded, Jenny Lindsay and theatre critic Kate Maltby, who sits on the board of the campaign group Index On Censorship....

For our review programme Tom Sutcliffe is joined by critics Dorian Lynskey and Briony Hanson. They are looking at: New comedy series The Studio, set in Hollywood and starring Seth Rogan and Catherine O’Hara. Delusions of Grandeur, Grayson Perry’s new exhibition where he selects items from the Wallace Collection, adds 40 new works and a new alter ego. And the film La Cocina, which gives an insight...

Peter Capaldi talks about his latest album – Sweet Illusions – a nod to the thriving 80s music scene in Glasgow where Peter made his musical debut fronting The Dreamboys. Through the Shortbread Tin is a new National Theatre of Scotland production about the supposed third century Scottish bard Ossian. Its writer – poet Martin O’Connor – and director Lu Kemp, share their exploration of one of the gr...

The actor and director Peter Mullan talks about taking on the role of Bill Shankly in the new theatre production in Liverpool, Red or Dead, about the much-loved Liverpool football club manager. In April 1925 the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, a seven-month exhibition of contemporary design, opened in Paris. Arts Décoratifs’ was soon shortened to Art Deco, an...

Bryan Ferry discusses his latest album, Loose Talk and reflects on his long career in music. Disney's new live action version of Snow White has just opened and has attracted criticism from those who felt it departed too far from the original film. Film critics Larushka Ivan Zadeh and Al Horner explore why Disney's reinterpretation of its own canon has become so controversial. The Windham Campbell...

Critics Hanna Flint and Boyd Hilton join Tom Sutcliffe to discuss Clueless, a new musical based on the 1995 film staring Alicia Silverstone. They also discuss Flow, Oscar-winning, dialogue-free, animated film based around the story of a cat who must find safety after its home is devastated by a flood. Plus Robert de Niro playing two gangsters in the Mafia drama The Alto Knights. Plus, ahead of Wor...

French auteur Francois Ozon, whose previous films include 8 Women, Swimming Pool and Potiche, talks about his latest, When Autumn Falls, a bittersweet story of age, youth and breaking the rules, set in a picturesque Burgundy village. As the centenary of his birth approaches, leading pianist Tamara Stefanovich and musicologist Jonathan Cross discuss the legacy and reputation of the iconoclastic com...

Sculptor Antony Gormley and Professor of French literature, Catriona Seth discuss Victor Hugo's visual art with Tom Sutcliffe. Victor Hugo was a 19th century cultural colossus, known for monumental works such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables as well as his poems, plays and political writings. It's not so well known that throughout his career Hugo drew with pen and ink - the same t...

Front Row's artist in residence, acclaimed Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson, reflects on five years since lockdown and we have another listen to his Front Row lockdown performance of the Adagio from Bach's Organ Sonata Number 4. How were the arts affected when the country locked down five years ago? Matthew Hemley of The Stage and Louisa Buck of the Art Newspaper discuss how the Covid crisis im...

Samira Ahmed and guest critics - the novelist and anthropologist Tahmima Anam and Ben Luke from the Art Newspaper - give their verdict on the week’s cultural releases. They’ve been to see Cate Blanchett in Anton Chekhov’s play The Seagull at the Barbican Centre. The classic drama still features characters from Russian nobility – but it’s given a modern-day treatment including VR headsets and quad...

Songwriter and musician Edwyn Collins performs live from his latest album, Nation Shall Speak Unto Nation, a series of 11 optimistic and defiant tracks released two decades on from two devastating cerebral haemorrhages. American novelist Torrey Peters, whose book Detransition, Baby became a bestseller and was nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction, talks about her new book Stag Dance, a colle...

As Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard is dramatised for television, director Tom Shankland and film critic Peter Bradshaw discuss the power of this classic Italian novel. Natasha Brown's first novel, Assembly, saw her favourably compared to Virginia Woolf and won a Betty Trask award. Her eagerly-awaited second novel Universality has just been published and she discusses leaving her c...

Adolescence – the new Netflix series starring Stephen Graham – explores every parent’s worst nightmare: a teenage son accused of a knife-crime. Co-writers and directors Jack Thorne and Philip Barantini join us to explain how the “single-shot” filming technique sheds light on the way toxic masculinity spreads online among young people. Fantasy fiction generated almost £25 million more in 2024 than...

In Front Row's Thursday review, Ellah Wakatama and Rhianna Dhillon give their take on Bong Joon Ho's new film Mickey 17 starring Robert Pattison, David Szalay's new novel Flesh, and Get Millie Black, Channel 4's Jamaica-set crime drama from Marlon James. Plus we hear from Sophie Elmhirst, whose Maurice and Maralyn: An Extraordinary True Story of Shipwreck Survival and Love has just been awarded th...

Actor Jessica Lange discusses her latest film, an adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer Prize winning play Long Day's Journey Into Night, in which she plays Mary Tyrone, a woman with a morphine addiction at the centre of a dysfunctional family, and a role for which she previously won a Tony Award on Broadway. Welsh National Opera's new joint CEOs Adele Thomas and Sarah Crabtree talk about their...

A new exhibition at London's National Gallery hopes to shed light on artists in 14th Century Siena, who have often been overshadowed by their Tuscan neighbours in Florence. Samira is joined in the studio by one of the curators, Imogen Tedbury, and by Maya Corry, a Renaissance expert from Oxford Brookes University to discuss the astonishing colours and use of gold by artists like Duccio, the Lorenz...