Front Row

It’s third time lucky for the National Theatre: it tried to re-open the Olivier, its largest auditorium, with The Death of England – Delroy in October. The first night was a triumph but, because of the lockdown, it was also the last night. Dick Whittington, the panto, was cancelled a fortnight before Christmas. But the Olivier sprang to life again this week with Under Milk Wood; Michael Sheen lead...

Ninety years since Dame Ninette de Valois founded what we know now as the Royal Ballet and 75 since her post war production of Sleeping Beauty, Tom Sutcliffe talks to Marianela Núñez, Principal Ballerina at the Royal Ballet about Sleeping Beauty's significance in the Royal Ballet's repertoire, the demands of playing such an iconic role and the challenges of rehearsing at home during lockdown. We e...

We're speaking to all the authors shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021 and tonight it's the turn of Cherie Jones. Her novel, How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House, is set on and around the Barbados beaches of the 80s. Lala braids tourists’ hair in the idyllic setting but her home life is blighted by poverty, violence and lack of choices – and when she has a baby, a dangerous chai...

Joan Armatrading discusses her 22nd album, Consequences, and writing songs about love inspired by observation rather than personal experience and how, despite recording every element herself at her home studio, it’s not a lockdown album. Scottish contemporary composer Erland Cooper's latest work, Carve the Runes Then Be Content With Silence, marks the writer George Mackay Brown’s centenary. Writte...

In two days' time, the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester will open its doors to an audience for the first time in over a year. And the first show to be presented will be a one-woman gig musical, a debut play from actor Lauryn Redding, she talks to Nick about penning the songs and the script and playing all the characters in Bloody Elle. Writer and director Harry MacQueen talks about his new fil...

50 years after last playing the Danish prince, Sir Ian McKellen is returning to the role of Hamlet, in an age, colour gender-blind production. At the age of 82, he has new insight to the character. He tells presenter John Wilson it’s clear to him Hamlet is bisexual, and how he is tackling the physical challenges of stage acting. He talks about his coming out in a BBC radio interview in 1988, how i...

We announce and speak to the winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Peggy Ashcroft said that Winnie, in Happy Days by Samuel Beckett, ‘is one of those parts…that actresses will want to play in the way that actors aim at Hamlet – a ‘summit’ part’. She was right, several great actresses, Ashcroft herself, Billie Whitelaw and Maxine Peake, have – while buried above the waist, then u...

Starring James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan, Together is a new BBC2 drama following a couple forced to re-evaluate their relationship during lockdown. Polar opposites in personality and political opinion, the unnamed characters “he” and “she” are only together for the sake of their young son. Can physical proximity create a new emotional connection? Critic Hanna Flint reviews. The winner of the 2021 C...

To play the celebrated British painter, J.M.W. Tuner, for Mike Leigh’s film, Mr Turner, the actor Timothy Spall learned to paint. Four years later, it was the paintings he created while playing the role of another famous British painter, LS Lowry, that led to his first commission for an exhibition of his own paintings. Timothy joins Front Row to talk about finding his own style as a painter. As a...

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegria Hudes discuss the new screen version of their smash hit musical, In the Heights, which celebrates the intertwined lives of Latino immigrants and their children in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of Manhattan, where both Miranda (who wrote the music) and Alegria Hudes (who wrote the script) grew up. The drama is focussed on Usnavi - the young owner of a co...

Poet Laureate Simon Armitage reflects on the experience of the pandemic in new BBC film, A Pandemic Poem: Where Did The World Go? Interspersed with interviews from people across the UK, the poem chronicles the pandemic from the first lockdown to the rollout of the vaccination programme. What one memory would you choose if you had to live it forever when you die? That’s the question posed in After...

Noel Gallagher discusses his new album Back the Way We Came: Vol 1, a Greatest Hits compilation from a decade of his band High Flying Birds that he formed once Oasis broke up in 2011. In the week that the Football Association has appointed its first ever female chair, playwright Amanda Whittington talks to John Wilson about her play Atalanta Forever. Set in 1920s Huddersfield, it is inspired by th...

Danny Elfman has composed the score for over 100 films including Batman, Men in Black, Edward Scissorhands, as well as writing The Simpsons theme tune. Before he worked in film he was a rock musician in a band called Oingo Boingo, and when the movie industry went into lockdown he used the opportunity to return to his rock roots. He’s just released a double-album called Big Mess. Danny talks to Sam...

The artist Ai Weiwei has just unveiled his seven-metre-tall Gilded Cage at Blenheim Palace, a sculpture which addresses the international migrant crisis. He discusses this, as well as the largest exhibition of his work ever staged, in Lisbon, and why he has now made Portugal his home. In the run-up to the awarding of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021, Front Row is talking to each of the shortlist...

Florian Zeller’s play The Father was hailed as a masterpiece. Zeller made his debut as a director with his film of it, and Sir Anthony Hopkins won an Oscar for his performance as the patriarch sliding into dementia. Zeller tells Kirsty Lang how he was determined to make a film, rather a film version of a play, and how he makes the audience experience the disorientation of a man as his mind crumble...

Actress and writer Joanna Scanlan - best known for her comedic roles in tv series such as The Thick of It, Getting On and No Offence - talks to Tom about her role as Mary Hussain an Islam convert in Aleem Khan’s moving debut feature After Love. Journalist Lee Trewhela discusses the close of Cornish theatre company, Kneehigh after more than 40 years. Novelist Chibundu Onuzo discusses her new novel...

Sierra Leone’s best-known journalist, Sorious Samura, discusses his documentary, Sing, Freetown. After growing tired of hearing only negative stories from Africa, the film follows Sorious and playwright Charlie Haffner’s journey to create a play that shows the true Sierra Leone. The entire Liverpool Biennial, the UK’s largest festival of contemporary art, has now opened, almost a year after it was...

Es Devlin, who designed sets for Hamlet with Benedict Cumberbatch and Stormzy at the Britz, has created something more quietly contemplative as artistic director of the London Design Biennale, filling the courtyard of Somerset House in London with trees. She tells Elle Osili-Wood about how forests in literature are places of transformation and how she created her Forest for Change, with a clearing...

Briony Hanson joins Tom to review two extremely different films starring animals as their central characters. First Cow - directed by Kelly Reichardt - is set in Oregon in the 1820s, in which two protagonists use stolen milk to survive in a harsh environment. Gunda – executive-produced by Joaquin Phoenix - is a 90 minute black and white, which follows a sow with her litter, some cows and a one-leg...

Paulette Randall MBE celebrates her 60th birthday this year. Her career highlights include her role as Associate Director of the unforgettable London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony and being playwright August Wilson's director of choice in this country. She has a rich and varied career on stage, screen and stadium taking in Shakespeare, sketch comedy and Silent Witness. She is in lively conversatio...

The pianist Mitsuko Uchida returns to the Wigmore Hall in London next week where she’ll be marking five decades since she first performed there. She discusses her love for the Schubert Impromptus that she’ll be playing, and how she’s enjoyed exploring new compositions during lockdown. Earlier this week Bolton found itself at the epicentre of the pandemic in England. Bolton is among the areas harde...

Breeders is a highly successful TV comedy series that looks honestly and unflinchingly at the difficulties (and rewards) of parenting. It’s just about to return for a second series and we speak with director and co-creator Chris Addison whose own work includes stand-up, acting and directing shows such as The Thick of It, In The Loop, Veep and many many more. Novelist Nadifa Mohamed tells us about...

Disney’s much-anticipated 101 Dalmatians prequel Cruella is the visually stunning origin story of the woman who becomes the puppy-stealing force of evil from Dodie Smith’s original 1956 story. Starring Emma Stone and Emma Thompson and directed by I, Tonya’s Craig Gillespie, it is set in late '70s London and channels much of punk’s dark energy and aesthetic. Larushka Ivan-Zadeh joins Front Row to a...

As the Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam opens a landmark exhibition, Slavery, exploring the Netherlands’ 250 years involvement in the trade of human beings, the Director, Taco Dibbits, joins Front Row to explain why this history must be embraced. British hip hop, grime and, more recently, drill are all musical subgenres that have emerged and thrived in London. But Mancunian artist Bugzy Malone is leading a...

David Weil is the showrunner for Hunters, a TV series which imagined the work of Nazi hunters in 1970s New York . The large cast included Al Pacino in his first ever TV lead role. When Covid closed down largescale productions, David Weil turned his hand to a much more intimate sort of show. Solos is a new 7-part fantasy series which is essentially monologues from the likes of Helen Mirren, Anne Ha...