Front Row

New documentary Matangi/Maya/MIA about the political rapper MIA, uses self-filmed archive footage of the outspoken and ‘controversial’ Sri Lankan immigrant artist who took up the Tamil cause. So how does the film by director and friend Stephen Loveridge help us understand her life and music? Journalist Kieran Yates reviews. The Man Booker Prize 2018 shortlist of six books has just been announced a...

Eileen Atkins talks about her latest stage role in Florian Zeller’s The Height of the Storm, a play about a couple who have been in love for 50 years. The actress, who began her career in the 1950s explains the challenges of Zeller’s writing and her preference for new theatre. 10 years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, John Kampfner, co-founder of the Creative Industries Federation, and arts...

Director Lenny Abrahamson on his film adaption of Sarah Waters’ novel The Little Stranger, a ghost story set in a dilapidated English manor in the 1940s. Abrahamson, who was Oscar nominated for his previous film Room, explains the how it is more than just a ghost story and talks about the challenges of adapting an unreliable narrator from the book onto screen. As the days get shorter and the light...

The French musician Christine and the Queens discusses bringing ideas about gender fluidity to the mainstream with a confident new persona, eighties influences, and her second album, named simply Chris, and released in both English and French versions. Writer Anil Gupta and director Iqbal Khan discuss turning Molière’s 17th century French comedy Tartuffe - which turned its fire on the hypocrisy of...

Killing Eve is the next thing to come from the pen of Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge. It is a thriller, steeped in her stylistic black humour, about a psychopath, played by Jodie Comer, who's pursued by Sandra Oh as an unassuming detective. Audiences in America have loved it, and it's has been nominated for two Emmy Awards, but what will the UK audience make of it? Arts journalist Sophie Wil...

Touching The Void. Memoir, documentary, now theatre performance - at the Bristol Old Vic. Written by David Greig , it's an adaptation of Joe Simpson's bestselling 1988 mountaineering memoir and the subsequent 2003 docu-drama detailing Simpson's disastrous 1985 attempt to make a first ascent of a mountain in the Andes. Theatre director Tom Morris talks to Kirsty about the challenges of transferring...

Hollywood legend Sir Michael Caine returns to the big screen in King of Thieves, the second cinematic adaptation of the infamous Hatton Garden burglary in 2015. The south London born actor looks back at his varied career, which he has seen him act alongside Sean Connery, Sylvester Stallone and even the Muppets and also become synonymous darker criminal roles, in films such as Get Carter, Harry Bro...

The Irish writer Sally Rooney's second novel Normal People, the story of a relationship between two young people from very different backgrounds, has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and is winning ecstatic reviews. She talks about structure, being true to her characters, and the pleasure and pressure of praise. TV critic David Butcher, reviews Trust, a new drama investigating the true sto...

Nick Payne, the writer of new BBC One series Wanderlust starring Toni Collette and Steven Mackintosh, discusses adapting his play on modern sexual relationships into a sexually upfront series for mainstream TV. In 2015 the Grand Hall of Battersea Arts Centre in London was devastated by fire. It was rebuilt and last week reopened - with the show that was in the space when it was destroyed. The arch...

BONUS EDITION: As part of the Inspire season, Front Row commissioned three artists to create works especially for the programme. Poet Alison Brackenbury was challenged to write a villanelle based on her great uncle, crime-writer Vaseem Khan would pen the first page of his new volume, and rapper and beatboxer Testament would produce a brand new track. This special edition of the Front Row podcast l...

As Front Row's Inspire season draws to a close, three artists unveil the artworks they were commissioned to create, and discuss the inspiration behind them. Alison Brackenbury has written a poem based on her Great-Uncle; crime-writer Vaseem Khan, author of the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency novels, reads the first page of his new volume; and rapper and beatboxer Testament performs his new compositio...

Award winning Doctor Foster writer, Mike Bartlett, discusses his new show Press alongside one of its stars, the Peaky Blinders actor Charlotte Riley. The programme centres around two competing papers, a broadsheet and a tabloid, both struggling to find their place in a changing world of print journalism. Award-winning poet, novelist, playwright, rapper and recording artist Kate Tempest on her new...

To celebrate her 50th birthday, the composer Roxanna Panufnik discusses her new album Celestial Bird which showcases the variety of her work, from religious choral music to an adaptation of a poem by the Indian polymath Rabindranath Tagore, as well as two major new commissions, one of which - Songs of Darkness, Dreams of Light - will have its world premiere at the Last Night of the Proms on Saturd...

As two new productions prepare to take on Shakespeare in fresh and unexpected ways, the women behind them - Jeanie O'Hare, creator of new play Queen Margaret, and Jude Christian creator of OthelloMacbeth - discuss developing new dramas from Shakespeare's canon. Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull is a theatre classic that has been produced in many different ways for stage and screen since its premier...

John Simm stars in new ITV drama Strangers as a man who has to fly to Hong Kong to identify his wife's body, only to discover she has a secret other life. We talk to the actor about filming the thriller in Hong Kong and why he's so often cast as an everyman figure. In Moby Dick, Captain Ahab vows vengeance against the white whale which took his leg and chases him around the globe. In his new book...

After a devastating fire at the newly-opened Alexandra Palace in London in 1873, a new building was designed and built which included an elaborate and elegant theatre, and the opening concert was of the early Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, Trial by Jury. The theatre hasn't been used as a performance space for 80 years, but tomorrow the BBC Proms will be broadcast live from the newly-restored spa...

Television drama Mother's Day charts the aftermath of the 1993 Warrington bombing, telling the stories of Colin and Wendy Parry (played by Anna Maxwell Martin and Daniel Mays), the parents of Tim Parry, one of two young boys who died in the attack, and Dublin housewife Sue McHugh (Vicky McClure). The BAFTA award-winning writer Nick Leather, who grew up in Warrington and who was a teenager on his w...

Idris Elba is a man of many parts - actor, DJ, kick-boxer and now film director. He discusses his first feature, Yardie, based on the hit novel of the same name, by Victor Headley which, in 1992, told the tales of "D", a Jamaican in London engaged in the super-violent drugs trade of the 1970s. The former Raleigh Cycle Company headquarters in Nottingham recently became the 400,000th listed building...

Andrew Miller, who won the Costa Book of the Year Award for his novel Pure, discusses his new book Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, an adventure story set during the Napoleonic wars. We consider how the idea of the artist's muse has changed over time, and ask what makes a modern muse? With art critic Louisa Buck, novelist and critic Matt Thorne and Andrew Miller. As the latest TV adaptation of Willi...

Poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan takes us on a guided tour of Darfield churchyard near Barnsley, as part of Front Row's Inspire season. Patrick Gale, who wrote last year's TV drama Man In An Orange Shirt, discusses his new novel Take Nothing With You, a coming-of-age story as a young boy obsessed with the cello realises how messy adult life can be. Are internet horror movies becoming a new genre?...

Monday sees the performance of a ‘Relaxed Prom’ at the Royal Albert Hall, offering an informal environment for children, young people and adults with autism, sensory and communication impairments, learning disabilities and other challenges. The Prom will feature the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and its ensemble BSO Resound, comprising six disabled musicians led by conductor James Rose who has ce...

Jed Mercurio's new drama Bodyguard follows Richard Madden as a troubled war veteran assigned as protection officer to the Home Secretary played by Keeley Hawes. TV critic Alison Graham reviews this latest offering from the writer of police thriller Line of Duty. As a One Direction themed fanfiction is now being turned into a feature film; we ask if fanfiction has finally gone mainstream with books...

Spike Lee's new film BlacKkKlansman is based on a true story from the 1970s. John David Washington plays Ron Stallworth the first African-American detective to serve in the Colorado Springs Police Department. Determined to make a name for himself he sets out on a dangerous mission to infiltrate and expose the Ku Klux Klan. Natty Kasambala reviews. Canadian author Esi Edugyan on her Man Booker Priz...

This year Sir Lenny Henry marks his 60th birthday with a special television programme with Sir Trevor McDonald. As well as performing some new sketches, he talks about bunking off school to appear in the TV talent show New Faces and how he fell in love with Shakespeare. He joins Stig to discuss a career that has spanned over four decades. In the US TV drama series Instinct, Alan Cumming stars as D...

How people with dwarfism have been represented in art and culture, from Ancient Egypt to Velasquez to Game of Thrones. Kirsty is joined by Tom Shakespeare, Professor of Disability Research at East Anglia University and Richard Butchins, who has made the BBC Four film Dwarfs in Art: A New Perspective. Scottish artist Barbara Rae has travelled to the Arctic in the footsteps of the Victorian explorer...