Front Row

Maxine Peake discusses playing Betty Boothroyd, former Speaker of the House of Commons in Betty! A Sort of Musical, which is about to open at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre. Turner Prize nominated artist Heather Phillipson, best known for her sculpture of a giant cherry topped ice cream on Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, discusses her exhibition 'RUPTURE NO 1: blowtorching the bitten peach'...

Clint Dyer discusses directing Othello starring Giles Terera at the National Theatre, the first Black director to do so. He talks about how he is approaching the racism and misogyny in the play, and the history of previous productions. In the second of Front Row’s interviews with the artists nominated for this year’s Turner Prize, Ingrid Pollard discusses her work, Carbon Slowly Turning, and how s...

Author Katherine Rundell talks to Tom Sutcliffe about her book Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, which has won this year’s The Baillie Gifford. In the first in a series of interviews with the artists shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize, Sin Wai Kin discusses how they use performance to challenge misogyny and racism. The acclaimed dance company Ballet Black, known for giving a...

The much-celebrated singer-songwriter Joan Armatrading on her 50-year career, her book of lyrics, The Weakness in Me, and new album Live at Asylum Chapel. Arts journalist Nancy Durrant, and art historian and writer Chloe Austin review Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s new show at the Tate Britain, and the film She Said, starring Carey Mulligan, which details the New York Times investigation into Harvey Wein...

Lara Feigel and Tom Shakespeare review Netflix’s new adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, starring Emma Corrin. The English National Opera stages an operatic reimagining of It’s a Wonderful Life, the classic 1946 Christmas film, by the composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer. Jake joins Samira. The casting of Ukrainian actors who have arrived here escaping the conflict, with actors Kater...

Director Matthew Warchus discusses his new film Matilda the Musical. Based on the Tony and Olivier award winning stage play, it brings Roald Dahl’s much loved children’s story to the screen. Scottish-Indian protest musician Kapil Seshasayee performs live and talks to Samira about his new album Laal. And art critics Louisa Buck and Bendor Grovenor discuss the impact of the recent climate protests i...

Luca Guadagnino won the Silver Lion for Best Director at this year's Venice Film Festival for his latest film, Bones and All, starring Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell. He talks to Tom Sutcliffe about confronting the taboo of cannibalism on screen and reuniting with Chalamet after Call Me By Your Name. Mark Bills, the Director of Gainsborough’s House, joins Tom to discuss the reopening of the...

With Samira Ahmed. Guests Katy Hessel and Lillian Crawford review Florence Pugh's drama The Wonder, based on an Emma Donoghue novel, and the Royal Academy's Making Modernism exhibition, which explores the lives of a group of female artists active in Germany in the early twentieth century. The theatre company Frantic Assembly is running a nationwide programme to find the actors of the future, hopef...

Julie Hesmondhalgh, who played Hayley Cropper on Coronation Street, on writing a survival guide for new actors- An Actor’s Alphabet. What happens when football is taken from the pitch and put on the canvas? Nick Ahad is joined by the curators of three football-inspired exhibitions: Art of the Terraces at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, plus The Art of the Football Scarf and It's The Hope That...

With Samira Ahmed. To mark the centenary of the first BBC radio broadcast, Samira Ahmed discusses the art of radio and radio’s influence on art with the novelist and radio enthusiast Tom McCarthy and with Benbrick, sound designer and co-producer of the Peabody award-winning Have You Heard George’s Podcast? From early on the BBC made programmes especially for children. Samira Ahmed speaks to Joy Wh...

The Crown: as series five is with us, we review the next ten part instalment of Netflix's royal drama as it slips into more recent territory - the turmoil of the nineties. Plus jailed Iranian film director Jafar Panahi’s new metafiction No Bears, in which he plays himself, forced to direct online from a village near Iran’s Turkish border. With Kate Maltby and Larushka Ivan-Zadeh. Jez Butterworth:...

Filmmaker Ryan Coogler discusses returning to Black Panther after the death of Chadwick Boseman and how that experience has inspired the making of the sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. In the wake of this year’s annual Museums Association conference which asked its members to “to reimagine our future if we are going to survive”, Front Row brings together Rowan Brown, CEO of Museums Northumbe...

Jennifer Lawrence and director Lila Neugebauer discuss their new film Causeway. Grammy award-winning mandolin player Chris Thile plays live in the studio from his latest album Laysongs, on the eve of his UK tour. A new book, Chokepoint Capitalism, looks at how big tech companies and large corporations control large parts of creative markets. The authors, Rebecca Giblin, a professor at Melbourne La...

Arts Council England have announced the most dramatic shift in funding for decades, diverting investment from London towards other parts of the country. The Chair of Arts Council England, Sir Nicholas Serota, Stuart Murphy of English National Opera, which is set to relocate out of London, and arts journalist Sarah Crompton discuss the details. Director Tas Brooker discusses her new film When We Sp...

Joan Bakewell and Hanna Flint give their verdicts on Hugo Blick's new TV Western on BBC2 starring Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer, 'The English'. They've also watched new film 'Living' starring Bill Nighy and Aimee Lou Wood with a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, based on an Akira Kurosawa film, 'Ikiru', about a man at the end of his life. Royal Opera House Opera Director Oliver Mears discusses his ne...

Playwright, poet and Children’s Laureate for Wales Connor Allen talks about his grime-theatre mash-up The Making of a Monster, a semi-autobiographical production about a young man struggling to find his place in the world. Harpist Catrin Finch and Irish violinist Aoife Ni Bhriain perform live in the Front Row studio and discuss their appearance at the Other Voices Festival in Cardigan, which will...

Author Nick Hornby on the similarities of Dickens and Prince, as he publishes his new book on the “genius” of the Victorian novelist and the sex-funk pop musician. On the eve of World Ballet Day, we talk to Pacific Northwest Ballet Principal Dancer, Cecilia Iliesiu, about the new project she has co-founded – Global Ballet Teachers - to make the teaching of ballet more accessible to ballet teachers...

Artist Alison Lapper and co-curator Emma Rutherford discuss a new exhibition Without Hands: The Art of Sarah Biffin, which takes a fresh look at the work of the pioneering Victorian painter. Actor and writer Ric Renton talks about his new play One Off at Theatre Live in Newcastle. Inspired by the time he spent in prison as a young man, it addresses a crisis in the prison system. As a new exhibitio...

Reviewers Karen Krizanovich and David Benedict give their verdicts on Tammy Faye, A New Musical at the Almeida Theatre in London, starring Katie Brayben, and from the combined creative forces of Elton John, Jake Shears, James Graham, and Rupert Goold. Plus they review Paul Newman, The Extraordinary Life Of An Ordinary Man - a memoir of the film star created from recently rediscovered transcripts o...

Art critic Laura Robertson reviews this year's Turner Prize show at Tate Liverpool. Presenter Nick Ahad pays a visit to the immersive exhibition, Turn It Up: The Power of Music at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester. Laura Robertson brings us up to date on the latest arts news, from the delayed funding announcement by Arts Council England, to Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof gallery's response...

Eliza Carthy is celebrating 30 years as a professional musician with a new album, Queen of the Whirl. She talks about this, the legacy of her musical family – as the daughter of Norma Waterson and Martin Carthy – the way traditional music develops, and her own song-writing, and performs live in the Front Row studio. Double Palme d'Or winning Swedish director Ruben Östlund tells Samira about his fi...

Taylor Swift and the Arctic Monkeys both released their debut albums in 2006. Their latest studio albums, Swift’s tenth, Midnights, and Arctic Monkeys seventh, The Car, have just been released. Laura Barton reviews them and compares their unexpected similarities. As new exhibition The Horror Show! opens at Somerset House, horror in art and film is discussed by the exhibition's co-curator Jane Poll...

For the poet Ezra Pound it was ‘year zero for Modernism’ but what were people in Britain really reading, watching, listening to and looking at in 1922? To mark the BBC’s centenary, Front Row reviews the popular culture of 1922: from the West End musical comedy The Cabaret Girl by Jerome Kern and PG Wodehouse to May Sinclair’s novel The Life and Death of Harriett Frean, via the silent film epic Rob...

Director Martin McDonagh talks about his new film The Banshees of Inisherin. The former Young People's Laureate for London, Selina Nwulu, discusses her latest collection of poems. John McDiarmid reports from The Royal National Mòd, Scotland’s festival of Gaelic culture.

Theatre producer Nica Burns talks about her brand new theatre building @sohoplace which is about to open in London’s West End. Film director Edward Berger discusses his German anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front. Jenny Beavan has designed costumes for some of Hollywood’s most celebrated and loved films, including Mad Max: Fury Road, Gosford Park, and A Room with a View. The film that led...