Front Row

The Architect - a play marking the 30th anniversary of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence - will take place on a double-decker bus travelling the route on which Stephen was attacked in 1993. Presenter Allan Little speaks to the director Matthew Xia and one of the playwrights, Bola Agbaje. Small independent publishers appear to be on a winning streak - last year several prestigious literary priz...

Dame Anna Wintour, Global Editorial Director of Vogue, tells Samira Ahmed about Vogue World, the magazine’s fashion and performance spectacular which makes its UK debut this month at the start of London Fashion Week. You may know the early 1900s Bloomsbury Group for its art and philosophy, but the collective was also in the vanguard of sartorial revolution. In the studio to discuss its impact on f...

Larushka Ivan-Zadeh and Mickey-Jo Boucher discuss A Mirror, a new play by Sam Holcroft about staging a drama in a country where state censorship controls the arts. It stars Trainspotting's Jonny Lee Miller. They’ll also look at Charlotte Regan’s film Scrapper about a young girl who is left living alone after her mother dies, then her father turns up. What happens next? Many will know Louis Garrel...

Authors Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché are live in the studio to discuss their new queer sci-fi thriller Prophet. Theatre director Wils Wilson has invited the comedian Stewart Lee to rewrite the Porter’s scene in a new RSC production of Macbeth. Wils and Stewart join Samira Ahmed to discuss drawing on stand-up comedy, pantomime and the politics of today to refresh Shakespeare's comic relief. And w...

Author Louise Doughty talks to Samira Ahmed about her new novel, A Bird in Winter. A fast-paced thriller set in the world of espionage, it follows a woman on the run who must work out who is on her trail. This summer for the first time British Sign Language interpretations were streamed live for all acts on the Glastonbury Pyramid Stage. Samira speaks to professional BSL music performance interpre...

Musician Corinne Bailey Rae performs live in the studio and discusses the inspiration for her new album, Black Rainbows. Writer Peter Arnott on his new play about the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum, Group Portrait In A Summer Landscape, opening at Pitlochry Festival Theatre on Friday. Plus short stories: critics Stephanie Merritt and Suzi Feay on two new collections - by Kate Atkinson and b...

A review of two of the big shows at this year’s Edinburgh Festival: Olivier award-winning writer Isobel McArthur has had great success with her genre-busting works Pride and Prejudice* (*Sort Of) and Kidnapped. Her latest play The Grand Old Opera House Hotel is a rom-com set in a haunted house filled with opera arias – it’s worlds apart from Funeral, a calm, interactive meditation on the nature of...

As the acclaimed 1976 Roman Empire drama series I Claudius returns to television screens, classicist Natalie Haynes and cultural critic Charlotte Higgins discuss the reasons for its success, whether its historical inaccuracies are any bar to its enjoyment, and if it stands the test of time. Plus conductor, curator, and composer Jules Buckley discusses his Stevie Wonder Prom celebrating 50 years of...

Front Row is live from Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh for festival season, presented by Kate Molleson. Scotland’s own Grammy award-winning violinist Nicola Benedetti will be with us to share her vision for this year’s Edinburgh International Festival, as she makes her debut as Festival Director. Kate will also be joined on stage by the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Colson Whitehead to discuss Crook...

As the death toll from wildfires in Hawaii rises, The Beekeeper of Aleppo author Christy Lefteri explains how similar tragedies in Greece inspired her new novel The Book of Fire. Battersea Arts Centre’s Artistic Director and CEO Tarek Iskander, critic Andrzej Lukowski and theatre consultant Amanda Parker discuss what could be behind the current exodus of artistic directors from theatres across the...

György Ligeti: on the 100th anniversary of his birth, we celebrate the Hungarian-Austrian composer and the 2023 Proms performances of his work - music which was famously used by filmmaker Stanley Kubrick in The Shining and A Space Odyssey. Pianist Danny Driver, and music critic, author and librettist Jessica Duchen join Tom to discuss. Plus we review La Cage Aux Folles - the musical story of a gay...

Mercury Prize winning and Oscar-nominated artist Anohni returns with a soulful new album, My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, released under the moniker Anonhi and the Johnsons for the first time. The artist Michael Moebius is preparing to launch another legal battle to protect his intellectual property, after successfully suing 399 companies for infringing his copyright in a landmark lawsuit....

On the 50th anniversary of the release of the martial arts film Enter The Dragon, actor and filmmaker Daniel York Loh and Bruce Lee’s biographer Matthew Polly discuss the star of the film, Bruce Lee, and his continuing influence across culture. As reality TV remains a staple of our television schedules, Carolyn Atkinson reports on the work that television production companies are now doing to supp...

When you fall in love how do you know it’s for real, and not just the result of chemicals in your brain? Lucy Prebble’s play The Effect is back at the National Theatre - Tristan and Connie fall in love during a clinical trial for a new antidepressant and wonder if their passion is merely drug-fuelled. The Welsh band Adwaith play their online hit Fel I Fod (How To Be) – just before the Camarthen ba...

The South African soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha talks to Front Row ahead of returning to the Proms this Saturday to sing Strauss’s Four Last Songs with the National Youth Orchestra. Critics Sharlene Teo and Max Liu review Joy Ride, the feature film debut of Adele Lim, who also wrote Crazy Rich Asians - and also Ann Patchett’s new novel Tom Lake, a story about how we tell the story of our li...

A new Welsh version of the comedy hit Fleabag is about to premiere at the National Eisteddfod in Boduan. Branwen Davies’ adaptation of the one-woman show for Theatr Clywd has been given the thumb’s up by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who wrote and starred in the original version ten years ago at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It was later turned into an award-winning BBC television series. Davies says she...

As the Booker Prize longlist is announced, literary critic Alex Clark takes us through the contenders for the £50,000 literary award for fiction, to be announced on 26th November. In September, a treasure trove of personal items belonging to Freddie Mercury - from fine art to furniture and fashion - will be sold at auction. In the run up to the sales, the collection will go on display to the publi...

Adjani Salmon is the writer of the award-winning web-series Dreaming Whilst Black, now on BBC Three. He tells Tom Sutcliffe about the reality and his fictional portrayal of the everyday struggles of being an aspiring filmmaker. Also on Front Row - the Aeneid, the epic poem written by Virgil more than 2000 years ago. As well as being one of the great works of classical literature, it's also one of...

Cuban composer, cellist and singer Ana Carla Maza performs live in the Front Row studio, ahead of her appearance at WOMAD, and discusses the unusual combination of cello and vocals. Tom Sutcliffe is joined by critics Neil McCormick and Tara Joshi to review two of the week’s cultural highlights – the shortlist for this year’s Mercury Music Prize and a new documentary Reframed: Marilyn Monroe. Prese...

Kathryn Ferguson, director of the documentary feature Nothing Compares, pays tribute to Sinéad O'Connor whose death was announced today. The film explores the five years at the start of Sinéad O’Connor’s career. Before appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe many performers hone their acts in a series of previews round the country. How does road-testing the shows prepare them for the festival? To discus...

Christian Blackshaw is a renowned classical pianist but has made only a handful of records preferring the concert platform. Ahead of his appearance at the Oxford Piano Festival on 29 July and as a prelude to that talks to Samira about his career and plays in the Front Row studio. What can the world of fine art learn from the tech start-ups of Silicon Valley? Samira speaks to entrepreneur and music...

Elizabeth Fremantle talks about her novel ‘Disobedient’, which explores the story of the extraordinary C17th woman artist, Artemisia Gentileschi, and how the traumatic events of her seventeenth year influenced her visceral biblical paintings like ‘Judith Slaying Holofernes’. Ahead of his premiere at the Proms, French horn player Felix Klieser plays in the studio for Front Row and tells Samira Ahme...

Sarah Phelps on BBC drama The Sixth Commandment, Blur's new album reviewed.

Presenter Nick Ahad meets Christopher Nolan, director of the much anticipated Oppenheimer film. It tells the story of the American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer who, in 1943, assembled a group of scientists in Los Alamos to create the world’s first atomic bomb. Ahead of the National Eisteddfod, the annual festival of Welsh poetry and music, we learn about the poetic tradition of Cynghanedd from...

Aindrea Emelife and black women in art. Nigerian-British curator on her Somerset House exhibition Black Venus, addressing colonial history and the representation of black women in art as subject and artist, and her new curatorial role at the Edo Museum of West African Art, opening in Nigeria from 2024. Earlier this year a viral song purporting to feature Drake and The Weeknd was removed from strea...