Front Row

Andrew Scott, who played the priest in the recent run of the TV comedy drama Fleabag, talks about the sexual chemistry between him and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, how he approached “that wedding speech” in the series finale and his new film Steel Country, in which Scott plays a garbage collector in Pennsylvania who believes a boy has been murdered. Dame Maggie Smith returns to the stage after 12 years t...

Seamus Heaney died in 2013. Had he lived tomorrow would have been his 80th birthday. Heaney was a rare writer - a poet both beloved and respected. He was an eloquent advocate for the place and craft of poetry. Who would have thought Beowulf could be a modern day bestseller? Seamus Heaney's translation was. He made a profound social impact, too, and at the time of the Good Friday Agreement Presiden...

British painter Jenny Saville, the most expensive living female artist in the world, discusses her new self-portrait, painted in response to Rembrandt's masterpiece Self-Portrait with Two Circles. Cellist Laura van der Heijden, who won the BBC Young Musician competition when she was 15, plays live and discusses her debut album of Russian music called 1948, which last night won the BBC Music Magazi...

The contemporary classical composer Gavin Bryars talks about the latest incarnation of his acclaimed 1971 work, Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet – a 12-hour overnight rendition at Tate Modern in London. The piece is based on a fragment of tape of a homeless man singing, and this performance combines the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Bryars’s own ensemble, the Southbank Sinfonia, and the part...

Alistair Hudson, Director of the Whitworth in Manchester and Charles Esche, Director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven have been awarded a Transformative Grant to rethink their respective art institutions. They join Front Row to discuss how the concept of useful art has the power to remake museums and galleries fit for the 21st century. England has one, Scotland has one, Wales has two, but Northe...

The Norwegian artist Edvard Munch is best known for The Scream, and a rare lithograph of the picture is at the heart of a major new exhibition of Munch’s work which opens at the British Museum this week. Critic Jacky Klein gives her response to Edvard Munch: Love and Angst, which focuses on the artist’s experimental prints, almost 50 of which are on loan from Norway’s Munch Museum. There's just on...

Carlos Acosta went from an impoverished upbringing in Havana, Cuba to a world-renowned ballet dancer and the first black Principal of The Royal Ballet. He tells John Wilson about his new film Yuli: The Carlos Acosta Story, and his plans for Birmingham Royal Ballet; he starts his role as its director in January 2020. Composer Iain Bell on the world premiere of his new opera Jack the Ripper: The Wom...

Tomorrow sees the opening of an ambitious new multi-purpose arts venue, The Shed, in New York. This £360m building, featuring a vast telescoping outer shell which travels on rails, is at the heart of Hudson Yards, a major new £20bn property development in Manhattan, and sits alongside a new, copper-coloured ‘vertical park’ designed by the Thomas Heatherwick studio. Critic Sarah Crompton gives her...

Sir David Attenborough discusses Our Planet, his new eight-part series and Netflix debut, which explores the unique wonders of the natural world, from the Arctic wilderness to the diverse jungles of South America. In partnership with World Wildlife Fund, the series continues the conservation campaign raised by Attenborough's earlier series Blue Planet II. Lee Ridley, aka The Lost Voice Guy, is the...

Toby Jones tells us about turning his hand to writing for the new six part BBC2 TV series, Don’t Forget The Driver. It's a dark and poignant comedy about Brexit Britain, set in a coach company in Bognor Regis. The latest DC comics film Shazam! flies into cinemas this week. Originally published as a comic strip in 1939, it's the story of Billy Batson, a normal 14-year-old who is given the ability t...

Suzi Quatro was the first female bass player to become a rock star in the 1970s, with hits like Devil Gate Drive and Can the Can. Fifty-five years after her first performance, Suzi talks about her new album No Control which she wrote with her son. Playwright and actor John Kani and director Janice Honeyman discuss John's new play for the RSC – Kunene and the King - which reflects on South Africa's...

The 1983 Scottish film Local Hero was a much-loved comedy drama about an American oil company rep who is sent to a fictional village in Scotland to purchase the town for his company. This film has now been adapted into a stage musical at the Edinburgh Lyceum with all 19 songs composed by Mark Knopfler, who wrote the film soundtrack. So does Local Hero the musical work? Novelist Ian Rankin delivers...

Tash Aw, winner of the Whitbread Award and Commonwealth Book Prize, discusses his new novel We the Survivors, about a man born in a Malaysian fishing village who tries to make his way in a country and society that is transforming. He describes the book as a tribute to those battling to survive in a ruthless, rapidly changing world. As museums such as the National Portrait Gallery and Tate Modern s...

Scottish artist Katie Paterson’s exhibition at Turner Contemporary, Margate, explores our relationship with the vastness and mysteries of the universe, as she works with scientists who have pioneered research on the cosmic spectrum. The artist discusses her fascination with the physical world. So many successful TV shows have non-celebrities at their heart, from documentaries to reality programmes...

A history of classical music in 10 minutes. Pianist Jeremy Denk traces seven centuries of Western Classical Music in one recital and album, C.1300 – C.2000, demonstrating at the piano the evolution of harmony from the medieval composer Machaut to Philip Glass. Author Arundhati Roy has agreed to appear at Hay Festival in May following the loss of sponsorship from corporate Tata. Will Gompertz repor...

Politics and Big Band music :British musician Matthew Herbert has created The State Between Us, a new album made in reaction to the progress of Brexit. It's a work which includes original composition, choral elements and recorded sounds which reflect the triggering of Article 50; there's someone walking the Irish border, someone eating fish and chips and even someone flying a WWII bomber. Matthew...

The recent Pinter season at the Pinter Theatre in London, culminating in the current production of Betrayal starring Tom Hiddleston, Zawe Ashton and Charlie Cox, suggests that Harold Pinter has a durability that other writers of his generation may not be able to claim. What are the qualities that give his work resonance to an audience today? The director Jamie Lloyd, theatre critic and Pinter biog...

Photographer David Bailey has shot some of the most iconic portraits of the last six decades, from the Kray twins to the Queen. He talks about his life and career and how to achieve the perfect portrait shot. Tomorrow the UK’s largest cast bronze sculpture is unveiled in Plymouth. John talks to artist Joseph Hillier, who has been working on the crouching female figure called Messenger for the last...

Ralph Fiennes' third film as director is The White Crow, the story of how Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev came from a peasant upbringing to be one of the greatest dancers, and how whilst on tour in Paris in 1961 he defected to the West from the Soviet Union. Critic Sarah Crompton reviews. Last week dozens of well-heeled American parents, including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin,...

Julia Roberts and Lucas Hedges discuss their new film Ben is Back, in which a mother faces difficult challenges when her drug-addicted son returns to the family home from rehab unexpectedly for Christmas. We consider the art of internet memes as the World Wide Web turns 30. Elise Bell, co-founder of Tabloid Art History, explains how they make memes that go viral on Twitter and Instagram, and art h...

Jordan Peele talks about Us - his new film about a family terrorised by their doppelgängers. Having upturned the horror genre with his Oscar-winning racial satire Get Out, Jordan takes aim at the American dream in this follow up, starring Lupita Nyong’o. The artist Christian Marclay is best known for The Clock - a 24-hour long film composed of nearly 12 000 clips, taken from films depicting time r...

Briony Hanson reviews the Golden Globe nominated film, Girl, which tells the story of a trans teenage girl who, training to be a ballerina is struggling to adapt to dancing “on pointe” during her transition from male to female. Two long lost episodes of The Likely Lads have recently been discovered and are coming out on DVD and Blu Ray. Dick Clement who, with Ian La Frenais, wrote the television c...

Idris Elba has a new Netflix comedy series: Turn Up Charlie. He plays a struggling DJ and eternal bachelor, who is given a final shot at success when he reluctantly becomes a ‘manny’ to his famous best friend's problem-child daughter, Gabby. Julia Raeside reviews. 25 years ago the Fisherman’s Friends were just a crew of friends in Port Isaac, Cornwall. Some of them were fishermen. They sang sang s...

In 2016 Waitress made history as the first Broadway musical with an all-female creative team. Millie Taylor reviews the new West End production, with music and lyrics by the American singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles. Sadie Jones, author of the Costa-winning The Outcast, discusses her fourth book, The Snakes, which is a tale of power, greed, secrets and shame that ends in tragedy. As the internet t...

Maggie Gyllenhaal discusses her new film The Kindergarten Teacher, in which she plays a teacher who believes one of her students is a child prodigy and begins to pass his poems off as her own. She also talks about having an intimacy director on the set of The Deuce, and her upcoming directorial debut - an adaptation of an Elena Ferrante novel. This week Akwaeke Emezi became the first non-binary au...