Front Row

Laura Mvula’s first two albums were Mercury-Prize nominated, and now 5 years later she has returned with ‘Pink Noise’, an 80’s-inpsired-synth-inflected album full that’s perfect for dancing to. She explains the inspiration behind the music, and how this is the album she always wanted to make. Since he posted his first Room Next Door video in 2019, comedian Michael Spicer has had over 60m views. Sp...

British director Ola Ince discusses her new stage production of Romeo & Juliet, currently on at Shakespeare’s Globe in London. Ince has given it a contemporary setting, but she doesn’t shy away from showing the play’s relevance to current societal struggles. The degree of harassment and bullying in the acting profession has been brought into the spotlight by #metoo and the recent Noel Clarke c...

With her new sound and light installation, Arcadia, Theatre and Opera director Deborah Warner has brought the feel of the field into The Factory – the new home for MIF. The Factory is still very much a building site open to the elements, but for one weekend only the festival is providing an opportunity for visitors, to see the new construction from the inside. And once inside the concrete shell, t...

The largest ever UK retrospective of the Portuguese-born artist Paula Rego opens at Tate Britain this week. Featuring over 100 works, many not seen before, the show spans Rego’s early work from the 1950s which responds to the socio-political context of Portugal at the time, to her more recent, richly-layered paintings. Critic Jacky Klein gives her response to the show. Black Widow is the long-awai...

Actor Giles Terera tells us about his new book Hamilton and Me: an Actor’s Journal, his inside account of preparing for, rehearsing and performing in the West End production of the smash hit musical, Hamilton, in which Terera played Hamilton’s rival and, ultimately, killer Aaron Burr. George Bridgetower was a mixed-race violin virtuoso, patronised by royalty, a pupil of Haydn and friend of Beethov...

We speak with Bobby Gillespie, front man of Primal Scream who has released a new album, Utopian Ashes, comprised of duets with French singer Jehnny Beth from Savages. Themed around a disintegrating marriage, it’s a richly orchestrated album that doesn’t necessarily fit into fans’ expectations for either singer. After Public Health Scotland revealed yesterday that over 1,000 people who attended Eur...

Composer and Arsenal fan Mark-Anthony Turnage will be setting a football game to music. Not just any game, but Arsenal’s title-winning 1989 final game of the season. He tells fellow fan John Wilson how he’ll be capturing the game in his piece Up for Grabs, which has its world premiere at the Barbican in London in November. As the V&A announce their plans for V&A East - two major new develo...

Later in his career Dickens toured the country doing hugely popular dramatic readings of his works. For his last tour he added in the scene where Bill Sykes murders Nancy but had concerns about how harrowing the passage was. As an exhibition opens at the Charles Dickens Museum we speak to the curator about how the reading affected both the audience and the author himself. Technology has transforme...

Simon Russell Beale was a choral scholar and the actor remains a serious musician who can play a Bach fugue. Now he is taking the role of Johann Sebastian in Nina Raine’s new play Bach and Sons and he talks to Samira Ahmed about his relationship with the composer. Does being able to play Bach help him to play Bach? French Exit stars Michelle Pfeiffer as a Manhattan heiress who has to downsize to P...

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...