Front Row

Emma Thompson discusses her role as a TV chat show host in her new film Late Night and, as she embarks on her first stand-up show, talks about politics, performing , and how much things have changed for women in comedy. As the winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019 is announced, we talk to her live from the ceremony. The books are: It’s The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker; My Sister, the...

Samira talks to Nigerian American performer, choreographer and writer Okwui Okpokwasili about the UK premiere of Bronx Gothic at London’s Young Vic. How does the piece delve into one woman’s attempt to shake loose memory in a performance at the intersection of dance, theatre and visual installation. Musical acts always used to be the headliners and sole draw for music festivals. Recently we have s...

Live magazine programme on the worlds of arts, literature, film, media and music

Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat Pray Love has sold fifteen million copies around the world and was made into a film with Julia Roberts. Her new novel is City of Girls, the story of a young woman discovering an exhilarating life in a theatre in New York in the summer of 1940. She talks about why she was unafraid of writing about a young woman’s sexual desire and about the dramatic and difficult even...

At the piano, composer Alan Menken discusses his music which led the rebirth of Disney animation with hits such as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, which he’s reworked for the new live-action version currently top of the box office. Georgia's state governor has signed legislation banning abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected (except in reported cases of rape or incest)....

The long awaited adaptation of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s cult fantasy novel Good Omens arrives on Amazon on Friday. Samira talks to Michael Sheen and David Tennant who play a fussy Angel and a loose-living Demon forced into an unlikely alliance to stop Armageddon. Brìghde Chaimbeul is a young Gaelic speaking piper from the Isle of Skye and one of Scotland’s rising stars. Brìghde won the BB...

Lenny Henry discusses his latest role as Elmore in August Wilson’s play King Hedley II. King is a young black man, just out of prison, who dreams of starting a business and a family. Then the smooth-talking, crap-shooting hustler Elmore wanders in and changes the dynamic in the yard. Artistic director Nadia Fall tells Samira why she has brought this epic, set in Pittsburgh in the Reagan era, to th...

Kirsty is joined by drag queens Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme, two of the biggest stars of American TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, who are on stage in London in Drag Becomes Her, a parody of Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn’s film, Death Becomes Her. As the 50th anniversary of the first man on the moon approaches we consider the moon’s place in culture. Artist Luke Jerram discusses his artwork Museum of...

Anish Kapoor’s latest exhibition features new sculptures in welded steel, granite and onyx, as well as a series of large-scale paintings which he rarely shows. The artist discusses his continuing fascination with depicting bodily fluids, and with his favourite colour, alizarin crimson. In the new film Booksmart, Beanie Feldstein plays one half of a pair of high school female friends who have succe...

Matthew Bourne's new dance work Romeo + Juliet has a young cast featuring dozens of teenage dancers who auditioned to join his professional company. John talks to choreographer Matthew Bourne, Paris Fitzpatrick and Cordelia Braithwaite who play Romeo and Juliet, and two young dancers from Leicester, Megan Ferguson and Alexander Love. Little Steven, or Stevie Van Zandt, is best known as the guitari...

Comedian Frank Skinner returns to the stand-up stage with his new tour Showbiz which he will be taking to the Edinburgh Fringe this summer where he first made his name, winning a Perrier Award in 1991. Now a radio and panel show host and co-writer of football anthem Three Lions with long time double act David Baddiel, he talks about the changing face of comedy and the thrill of improvisation. BAFT...

Stephen Poliakoff talks about his new BBC Two drama Summer of Rockets. The story of Russian immigrant and inventor Samuel Petrukhin's attempts to induct his family into English high society against the backdrop of the Cold War, stars Toby Stephens, Keeley Hawes and Timothy Spall and is Poliakoff's most autobiographical work yet. The first time Selina Thompson used her adult passport it was to get...

Rocketman is the new Elton John film musical that charts the singer’s life from his upbringing in Pinner, meeting his long-time collaborator Bernie Taupin, making it big and then struggling with addictions. We speak to the director Dexter Fletcher - who also worked on Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody - about making the film which stars Taron Egerton and was executive-produced by Sir Elton and his hu...

News from the Cannes Film Festival, including the premieres of Elton John biopic Rocketman and Ken Loach's Sorry We Missed You. With film critic Jason Solomons. David Chipperfield pays tribute to fellow architect I.M Pei, famous for his iconic designs such as the Louvre pyramid, who has died aged 102. Scottish crime writer Denise Mina on Conviction, her latest novel whose narrator is obsessed with...

The actor Stephen Graham originally made his mark as the racist skinhead Combo in Shane Meadows’s 2006 film This Is England. The actor and director have teamed up again for a new 4-part Channel 4 drama The Virtues, in which he plays a troubled alcoholic trying to get over the trauma of his childhood. The actor discusses making the show, as well as his recent role as undercover cop John Corbett in...

Television dramatist Sally Wainwright has written award-winning crime series such as Happy Valley, heart-warming love stories such as Last Tango in Halifax. The last time she turned her attention to the 19th century, it was to portray the Brontës in To Walk Invisible. Now she’s returned to the Victorian age, this time looking at the life of lesbian landowner Anne Lister. Historical novelist, Phili...

Mark Billingham, Val McDermid and Doug Johnstone are well-known for their detective stories, which they write alone. But they come together as members of the band Fun Lovin' Crime Writers. They perform live and talk to Stig Abell about their day jobs, the joys of collaborating as a popular beat combo and the connections between these. They stay on as cultural commentators to give their opinions of...

Keanu Reeves returns to cinemas in John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, reprising his role as the super-assassin. He takes pride in performing most of the action scenes and discusses working with the director Chad Stahelski, himself a former stuntman. Paul Gambaccini remembers the singer-turned-movie-star Doris Day whose death at the age of 97 was announced today. Research recently published in the...

On the night of 18th April, 2015 a 90-foot fishing boat packed with migrants sent out a distress signal. It collided with a vessel responding to that call and sank between Libya and the Italian island of Lampedusa. Between 770 and 1,100 people drowned. Now the wreck has been raised and installed at the Arsenale, the historical naval yards in Venice - as an art work. Tim Marlow, director of exhibit...

Mark Haddon is the author of the phenomenally successful The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. He talks about his first novel in seven years, The Porpoise, in which he takes on the epic tale of Pericles. At this year’s Venice Biennale, the contentious American artist, Jimmie Durham, will be given the prestigious Golden Lion award for Lifetime Achievement. Art critic Ariella Budick dis...

When Guy Chambers teamed up with Robbie Williams in 1997, they created one of the most successful songwriting partnerships in British pop history. Now Guy has released his debut solo album called Go Gentle into the Light, performing hits such as Angels and Millennium on the piano. Writer Nina Stibbe has been announced as the winner of the 2019 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction f...

Director Amma Asante on her new film Where Hands Touch, which follows Leyna, an Afro-German girl, living under the increasingly dangerous and racist Nazi regime during World War II. Asante discusses her approach, used in this film and in A United Kingdom and Belle, of shining a light on little known histories often involving black characters to tell us something about the world today. Years and Ye...

Among the designs of the leading British-Ghanaian architect Sir David Adjaye OBE are the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, which opened in 2016 in a ceremony led by the then US President Barack Obama, and the planned UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre next to the Palace of Westminster in London. David Adjaye is in Venice ahead of the openi...

The Malian singer Rokia Traoré is celebrated for her extraordinary voice, her collaborations with musicians and writers such as Damon Albarn and Toni Morrison, and her efforts to give opportunities to other artists in Mali. These qualities and interests are reflected in her choices as Guest Director of this year’s Brighton Festival. She talks about the work she and others will be performing. In Ge...

The death of Andrea Levy earlier this year adds a poignancy to the National Theatre's staging of her prizewinning 2004 novel Small Island, the story of the Windrush generation and their reception in Britain. Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff reviews. Screenwriter Craig Mazin on his Sky/HBO drama series Chernobyl, about the nuclear plant disaster of 1986 and the people who sacrificed themselves to save Europ...