Front Row

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...

The live ceremony for the 2022 Booker Prize for Fiction, hosted by Samira Ahmed. The winner of the £50,000 prize will be announced by the chair of judges Neil MacGregor in the presence of Her Majesty The Queen Consort, who will award the trophy. The author Elif Shafak reflects on the recent violent attack on Sir Salman Rushdie, whose novel Midnight's Children was chosen as the Booker of Bookers. A...

Emily is a new film starring Emma Mackey (of Sex Education fame) as the author of Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë. Emily is as wild as the windswept moorland she lives in; her relationships with her sisters, Anne and Charlotte, her dissolute brother, Branwell, and her lover, the curate Weightman, are as raw as the relentless rain, and as tender as the flashes of sunshine. But writer and Director F...

Front Row comes from Belfast where Steven Rainey hears about some of the highlights of this year’s Belfast International Festival. Pianist Ruth McGinley talks about her new album AURA, a collection of traditional Irish airs re-imagined for classical piano. Ruth found success at a young age after winning the piano final of the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition but felt burnt out by the pre...

Jazz saxophonist Camilla George plays live in the studio and talks about her new album Ibio-Ibio - a tribute to her Ibibio roots in Nigerian. Iranian artist Soheila Sokhanvari joins Samira to discuss Rebel Rebel, her first major work in the UK. The exhibition at the Barbican’s Curve features 27 miniature portraits of pioneering female performers who blazed a trail in cinema, music and dance before...

Alan Garner’s 10th novel, Treacle Walker, may be one of the shortest books to make the Booker Prize shortlist but once read the slim volume which explores the nature of time weighs on the reader’s mind. Alan talks to Nick Ahad about the creation of Treacle Walker and what’s it like to be the oldest author ever to be nominated for the UK’s most celebrated literary prize. Monteverdi’s opera, Orfeo,...

Author Percival Everett talks to Tom Sutcliffe about his Booker Prize nominated novel, The Trees, which uses dark humour to explore gruesome events in Mississippi. Science Fiction writer Una McCormack and historian Prof Anthony Bale review Stephen Frears's new film The Lost King, about the real life search for the remains of Richard III and a new exhibition at the Science Museum devoted to Science...

Mercurial musician Björk has just released her tenth album Fossora. She discusses the experience of making the album and her interest in mushrooms. Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize for the second time, this time for her second novel Glory. It recounts the political turmoil of Zimbabwe’s recent past through a cast of animal characters. NoViolet tells Sam...

The announcement of the winners of the BBC National Short Story Award and Young Writers’ Award with Cambridge University live from the Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House in London. Joining Tom Sutcliffe to celebrate the imaginative potential of the short story are chair of judges Elizabeth Day, previous winner Ingrid Persaud, and the poet Will Harris. All the stories are available on BBC Sounds....

American actress Viola Davis, who has won an Oscar, Emmy and a Tony for her outstanding performances, plays a female warrior in the historical epic The Woman King. Viola Davis and director Gina Prince-Bythewood discuss bringing the story of a 19th Century female general to life. Rona Munro’s trilogy The James Plays were one of the theatrical highlights of the year when they premiered in 2014. She...

Artist Samson Kambalu talks to Shahidha Bari about his sculpture Antelope, a thought provoking commentary on colonialism which has just been unveiled on Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth. Period gangster drama Peaky Blinders has been turned into a ballet by dance company Rambert. As it opens in Birmingham, Rambert Dance's Helen Shute explains how they've interpreted the TV show for the stage. Scree...

The Blackwater Lightship is a novel by Colm Tóibín, published in 1999 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later made into a film and has now been dramatized for the Dublin Theatre Festival. Set in the early nineties, it tells of a young gay man suffering from AIDS who visits his grandmother in rural Wexford and the repercussions his arrival has on her, his mother, and sister. Elle talks t...

Luke Jones meets the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, whose show Only An Octave Apart is about to begin a month long run at Wilton’s Music Hall in London. He discusses how he discovered his range, why he fuses opera with pop and his return to the ENO next year in Philip Glass’s Akhnaten. Luke takes a tour round See Monster in Weston-super-Mare, a retired North Sea rig that's been turned into on...

Michael Winterbottom discusses writing and directing a SKY TV drama, This England, starring Kenneth Branagh as Boris Johnson during his tumultuous first months as Prime Minister and the first wave of the COVID pandemic. GALWAD, an ambitious, multiplatform arts project set in Wales, imagines what it would be like if we could receive messages from people living in 2052. Audiences can follow the stor...

Critics Boyd Hilton and Sarah Crompton review Blonde, Andrew Dominik’s film adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel about Marilyn Monroe. They also discuss Inside Man, a new drama from Sherlock creator Steven Moffat, starring David Tennant and Stanley Tucci. Anna Bailey is the last of the authors shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. They’ll be talking about their story Long Way to Co...

Beth Orton performs two songs from her new album, Weather Alive, and discusses creative partnerships as well as life after being dropped by her record label. American author Jodi Picoult has turned Markus Zusak’s best-selling novel The Book Thief into a musical, which has just had its world premiere at the Bolton Octagon. She discusses adapting a novel for the stage and explains why she feels the...

Ralph Vaughan Williams is one of our country's greatest ever composers. Born 150 years ago in 1872, he is known for creating a sense of Englishness in twentieth century music by drawing on his love of folk song, Tudor church music and landscape, in pieces like the perennially popular The Lark Ascending and Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. Samira Ahmed explores his musical language and revels...

Bestselling author Louise Doughty discusses her new BBC One drama Crossfire, a thriller about a terrorist attack in a luxury holiday resort, starring Keeley Hawes. She talks about writing for the screen for the first time, after her novels Apple Tree Yard and Platform 7 were adapted for television. Singer songwriter Miki Berenyi, who is best known as part of the 1980s/90s indie rock band Lush, tal...

Journalist and author Hadley Freeman, and Art UK editor and art historian Lydia Figes, review Ticket to Paradise starring George Clooney and Julia Roberts, and the Winslow Homer exhibition at the National Gallery. And head judge Elizabeth Day joins Front Row for the announcement of the shortlist for the 2022 BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University. The first two shortlisted author...