Front Row

Rupert Everett discusses his life-long passion for Oscar Wilde as he directs, writes and stars in his film The Happy Prince. Framed around Wilde's short story of the same name, the bio-pic focuses on Wilde at the end of his life, from his release from prison to his death in poverty in Paris three years later. Abir Mukherjee's creation of detective Sam Wyndham, a British officer who finds himself i...

Front Row announces the winner of the £30,000 Women's Prize for Fiction, 2018, and talks to her about her winning novel. Sunderland indie rocker and songwriter Nadine Shah performs live in the studio and talks to John about the importance of musicians taking a political stance. Critic Rhianna Dhillon reviews the latest outing of the Jurassic Park franchise which sees the return of Chris Pratt and...

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition opens on 12th June. It has been held every year without interruption since 1769 providing a platform for emerging and established artists. This year it is co-ordinated by Grayson Perry with the theme "Art Made Now". Art historian Jacky Klein joins Stig to review the exhibition. Shebeen is a new play set amongst the Caribbean community in 1950s Nottingham. Inspir...

Playwright David Edgar is 70 this year. He was 20 in 1968 coming of age, in Bob Dylan's words, when 'there was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air'. In a revolutionary move for him David Edgar is taking to the stage himself in the latest of his many theatre pieces. In his one man show, Trying it On, Edgar reflects on the political eruptions of his lifetime and his engagement with...

Orlando Bloom swaps Middle-earth and the high seas for a Texas trailer park in his first West End production in over a decade, Killer Joe. He talks about playing Joe Cooper, a policeman turned assassin, employed by a family at their wits end to kill their mother for a cut of her life insurance money. Is death, the 'last taboo', finally being broken down by the arts? We consider the recent glut of...

The £23m Weston Tower and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries at Westminster Abbey will be opening to the public next month. Architecture critic and historian Tom Dyckhoff gives his response to these two new additions to the abbey church, the site of all royal coronations since William the Conqueror in 1066. Why are so many British writers setting their stories in the countryside at the moment?...

Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen star in the rom-com Book Club which makes its older cast the heart of the story. But does it make good use of such stellar talent? Angie Errigo reviews. Singer-song writer Angélique Kidjo performs live from her new album Remain In Light, which re-imagines track-by-track the original post-punk band Talking Heads' landmark album. She talk...

French director François Ozon discusses his latest film L'Amant Double, a psychological thriller in which a young woman falls in love with her secretive psychiatrist. Patrick Heron, the British artist and critic is celebrated in a new retrospective exhibition at Tate St Ives. Heron played a major role in the development of British post-war abstract art exploring the Cornish light and colour in the...

At the age of ninety jazz singer Dame Cleo Laine looks back at her extraordinary career. She talks to Stig Abell about her lasting musical and romantic partnership with saxophonist and composer Sir John Dankworth, her friendship with Ella Fitzgerald and collaboration with Ray Charles. Stig visits Cleo at her countryside home, where in 1970 she and husband John Dankworth created The Stables concert...

Iconic dancer and choreographer Akram Khan shows John around his studio at his home and discusses a life of dance, preparing for his final solo performance and what he plans to do now that he is retiring from the stage. The Austrian artist Egon Schiele features alongside a young American photographer Francesca Woodman in a new exhibition Life In Motion at Tate Liverpool. The artists used their own...

Designer Orla Kiely is famous for her distinct Stem-patterned bags and a global brand that includes fashion, accessories and homeware. Now the first exhibition dedicated to her opens at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London. She discusses the origins of her work at a kitchen table in Ireland and why she thinks that pattern can make you happy without even noticing. Crime novelist Belinda Bauer t...

The American writer Philip Roth, whose death at the age of 85 was announced today, is remembered by Ian McEwan, his biographer Claudia Pierpont, and American novelist Amy Bloom. From Roth's first novel Goodbye Columbus in 1959 to Portnoy's Complaint, American Pastoral and The Plot Against America, he was writer who courted controversy and explored complex themes concerning sexuality, Jewish life a...

Phoebe Waller-Bridge, writer and star of TV series Fleabag, discusses balancing performance and writing, and her latest role as L3, a female droid in the latest Star Wars episode, Solo. Andrew Sean Greer has just won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his comic novel Less, about a failed novelist who embarks on a trip round the world rather than attend his ex-lover's wedding. He discusses writing...

Ian McKellen looks back on his acting career and his work as a gay rights activist as a new documentary film comes out about his life. Critic Julia Raeside reviews season 2 of The Handmaid's Tale, which has just started on Channel 4. Bill Gold - the creator of some of the most memorable classic movie posters from the early 1940s until 2011, including Casablanca, Alien and Dirty Harry - died yester...

Shakespeare's Globe found itself in a storm of controversy when Artistic Director Emma Rice left the theatre amid objections to her use of modern lighting and amplification. In her stead the actor Michelle Terry was appointed and her first two productions, As You Like It and Hamlet, have just opened. Terry takes the title role in Hamlet but the approach is a resolutely ensemble one, with casting a...

As he celebrates his 80th birthday, photographer Joel Meyerowitz looks back at his career which is the focus of his new book of photos, Where I Find Myself. It features his early work as a street photographer in New York in the '60s, his images of Ground Zero immediately after the 9/11 attacks, and his most recent still lifes in Tuscany. In a unique commission to open the 2018 Charleston Festival,...

Film critic Jason Solomons reports from Cannes on the big films, rising stars and talking points at this year's festival. In 1970 Lou Reed not only left The Velvet Underground but he decided poetry was his vocation. In 1971 he gave a reading at St Mark's church in New York which was recorded. 'Do Angels Need Haircuts?' is a slim volume of Reed's early poems that draws on this recording and other a...

The American writer Tom Wolfe has died aged 88. His style of reportage in the late 60s became known as the New Journalism, and his best known books were the Right Stuff about the first NASA astronauts, as well as his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities which epitomised the excesses of Wall Street in the 80s. Writer and critic Diane Roberts pays tribute. Director Richard Eyre talks about his new film...

As the Royal Ballet stages their new production of Swan Lake this week, we go behind the scenes during rehearsals to meet some of the cast and crew, including choreographer Liam Scarlett, designer John Macfarlane and principal dancer Marianela Nuñez. This year is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights. An intense tale of passionate relationships, it is cons...

Writer David Nicholls, best known for One Day, talks about bringing sex, drugs and a silver spoon to life in his television adaptation of Edward St Aubyn's acclaimed Patrick Melrose novels starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Gaz Coombes, former frontman of alternative rock band Supergrass, performs a track from his new album, World's Strongest Man, live in the studio and discusses its eclectic influenc...

Michael Fassbender was reportedly happy to be filmed completely naked in the film Shame, but compared with female nudity, male full-frontal shots are still rare on screen. What are the reasons for this disparity and what are the certification issues with representation of the male organ? The BBFC's David Austin and film critics Hannah McGill and Ryan Gilbey consider the long and the short of it. C...

Neil Gaiman discusses the big-screen adaptation of his 2006 short story How To Talk To Girls At Parties. Directed by Hedwig and the Angry Inch director John Cameron Mitchell, the film tells the story of a teenage punk falling in love with an alien, and stars Nicole Kidman, Elle Fanning, Ruth Wilson and Matt Lucas. In our age of heightened awareness of racism, homophobia and sexism in culture, how...

Ian McEwan discusses the process of adapting his novel On Chesil Beach for the big screen. Set in 1962, it tells the story of two young newlyweds spending their honeymoon preoccupied with - and terrified by - the forthcoming consummation of their marriage. Drew McOnie talks about directing and choreographing the first UK staging of Strictly Ballroom: The Musical, based on the much-loved 1992 Baz L...

Norwich will soon be home to the new National Centre for Writing in the medieval Dragon Hall. Chris Gribble tells Kirsty Lang about the extraordinary building and the role of the Centre. Authors Sarah Perry and Sarah Hall describe the thriving literary culture of the city and Kirsty visits The Book Hive, one of the city's independent bookshops. She goes to the Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Librar...

Graphic artist David Shrigley discusses his role as Guest Director of the Brighton Festival 2018, and his new book Fully Coherent Plan for a New and Better Society. Madeline Miller won the Orange Prize for Fiction with her debut The Song of Achilles, which told the story of a love affair between Achilles and Patroclus. Her latest novel continues the Greek theme with the story of the first witch in...