Front Row

Tracey Thorn describes her new record 'Record' as 'nine feminist bangers'. She talks to John Wilson about why electro-pop turns out to be her preferred style for a musical look back at various stages in her life from birth, through teenage crushes and learning to play guitar to motherhood. The Finnish National Gallery has just become the latest institution to make digital images of works in its co...

Playwright Dennis Kelly's emotional new play Girls and Boys centres on the story of a woman in an aggressive man's world. Kelly and actor Carey Mulligan, the star of the one-woman show, discuss the disturbing themes in the play and the challenges of performing it. Following a major leak from the Game of Thrones set - and the accompanying outrage - we ask writer Gareth McLean and TV critic Emma Bul...

I, Tonya is a new biopic about figure skater Tonya Harding, who was known as the bad girl of the ice rink. The film stars Margot Robbie and Allison Janney who've won a Golden Globe and a BAFTA respectively for their performances. Briony Hanson reviews. With the Winter Olympics in full swing we ask 'is figure skating a sport or an art'? Robin Cousins, former Olympic champion and current commentator...

To mark the 100th anniversary of women over 30 getting the vote in the UK we have a themed programme looking at the art that was created alongside the suffrage campaign and we celebrate the contribution of female artists. For the last two weeks we've been asking Front Row listeners to nominate their favourite art work by a woman. Jenny Éclair and Rosie Fletcher come into the studio to champion the...

The trauma of child abuse lies at the heart of two new memoirs - Louise Allen's Thrown Away Child, and The Only Girl in the World by the French writer Maude Julien. As they look back over their years of mistreatment by the adults in their lives, they explain how they found solace in art and literature - which provided both a lifeline, and an escape from pain and deprivation that was being inflicte...

Actor Ruth Wilson talks about starring in Clio Barnard's new film Dark River, a powerful psychological drama about a sheep farming family in Yorkshire. She also discusses the BBC TV drama she is making about her grandfather, a novelist who she recently discovered was also a spy with several wives. A new report, commissioned by the Art Fund, has called for greater investment in museum collections a...

Greta Gerwig recently made history as the first woman to be Oscar-nominated for her directorial debut, Lady Bird. She tells Kirsty why she wrote a coming of age drama about a confused teenage girl growing up in her own hometown of Sacramento, and why she is now keen to write a play or act on the West End stage. Writer Benjamin Markovits was shortlisted for the BBC's National Short Story Award last...

The Shape of Water leads this year's Oscars race with 13 nominations. Directed by Guillermo del Toro, it's an other-worldly fairy tale about a mute cleaner (Sally Hawkins) who falls in love with an alien-like creature imprisoned at the high-security laboratory where she works. Mark Eccleston reviews. As a blockbuster exhibition of the Terracotta Warriors opens at the World Museum in Liverpool, fea...

Musician and campaigner Bob Geldof discusses A Fanatic Heart, his feature length documentary about poet W B Yeats. He explains how he came to love the poetry of Yeats and why he considers the Nobel prize-winning poet to be one of the founders of modern Ireland. As Fifty Shades Freed, the third and final instalment of the Fifty Shades franchise is released in cinemas this week, literary critic Alex...

Chadwick Boseman discusses taking on the role of Black Panther, the first black mainstream comic book hero, and talks about the responsibility he feels in taking on the first black lead in a superhero film. Following the release of Black Panther, critic Dreda Say Mitchell, and comic book writer, Kieron Gillen, review the film, and consider whether the time of the black superhero has finally arrive...

Playwright David Hare talks to Samira about his latest television drama Collateral, a series that begins like a police procedural but drifts into a state-of-the-nation thriller. Carey Mulligan stars as a police detective whose investigation into the shooting of a pizza delivery man has spiraling repercussions. Carmen is opera's greatest femme fatale, the sexually liberated cigarette factory worker...

Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz on their new film The Mercy, which tells the true story of the ill-fated attempt in 1968 by the amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst to become the first person to sail solo, non-stop, around the world. Vaseem Khan discusses his latest Inspector Chopra novel, about an Indian detective with a baby elephant as his sidekick, which he has written as a Quick Read. As Irish and No...

As artists back photographer Nan Goldin's call to hold arts patrons the Sackler family to account over the US opioid crisis, we discuss the ethics of funding the arts. Soul singer Mica Paris talks about her current projects exploring the life and work of legendary jazz pioneer Ella Fitzgerald, and performs live in the studio. Jim Crace has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. He talks...

Mike Bartlett, the writer of Doctor Foster and Charles III, on his new three-part TV drama Trauma, in which Adrian Lester stars as a surgeon accused of negligence by a patient's father, played by John Simm. Last week a new prize was launched for thriller novels that do not include any violence against women. Since that announcement the Staunch Book Prize has been both lauded as much needed, and cr...

Nicola Benedetti has co-written a new cadenza for Beethoven's Violin Concerto. As she embarks on a tour with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, she talks to Kirsty Lang about the challenges of performing this classical masterpiece. Jason Solomons reviews Winchester: The House That Ghosts Built, which stars Helen Mirren in the first horror movie of her 50 year career and is set in the real...

Simple Minds, the stadium-filling band from Glasgow, have been together for 40 years. As they release Walk Between Worlds, lead singer Jim Kerr looks back on the four decades and the band perform an acoustic version of a song from the new album. Reputed to be Daniel Day-Lewis' final film before retiring from acting, Phantom Thread travels behind the doors of London's 1950s fashion houses. Film cri...

All day long I'd bidi-bidi-bum... Sheldon Harnick is 93 and won worldwide acclaim as the lyricist of the hugely successful Fiddler on the Roof. As a new production of Rothschild & Sons, one of his lesser-known musicals, opens in this country he talks about a lifetime of lyrics. Britain's first professor of Musical Theatre, Professor Millie Taylor, and theatre critic David Benedict discuss the...

Last year, wunderkind playwright James Graham premiered three plays Ink, Labour of Love, and Quiz which looked respectively at the rise of the Sun newspaper, Labour party history; and the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire "coughing Major" scandal. As he begins 2018 with another premiere, The Culture: A Farce in Two Acts, he discusses turning his attention to Hull's year as City of Culture and his desi...

Former National Theatre director, Sir Nicholas Hytner on his new production of Julius Caesar, starring Ben Whishaw and David Morrissey, which offers the audience a chance to stand and be immersed in the action. Sir Nicholas talks about the staging, how contemporary politics resonates with this Shakespeare play and about his new venue the Bridge Theatre. Ruth Barnes looks at what the list of Grammy...

As part of Radio 4's Reading Europe season, Kirsty Lang explores Turkish literature in Istanbul, talking to leading writers including Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. Critics Kaya Genc and Nagihan Ibn Haliloglu discuss how the Turkish literary scene compares to our own: what are the bestselling books, and how are writers dealing with the current political situation, given Turkey has imprisoned more wri...

In 2016 Paapa Essiedu became the first black actor to play Hamlet for the RSC. As he reprises the role for a tour of the production we speak to the actor tipped to be a star, about Hamlet and his performances in television dramas Kiri and The Miniaturist. It's rare for a poetry essay to make the news headlines but that's exactly what's happened to the essay written by Rebecca Watts in the current...

Now just 18, cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason won the title of BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2016. His choice of repertoire ranges from Shostakovich to Bob Marley and he plays live in the studio on the release of his debut album, Inspiration. Following the announcement of the death of Ursula K. Le Guin, the Earthsea writer's literary agent Ginger Clark and fantasy novelist Vic James discuss her lega...

The nominations for the 90th Academy Awards were announced earlier today, with Guillermo del Toro's fantasy romance The Shape of Water receiving the most, including best picture. Stig Abell is joined by film critics Larushka Ivan-Zadeh, Gaylene Gould and Tim Robey to consider the winners and losers, and to assess whether the nominations reflect events of 2017 including Weinstein and #MeToo, and wh...

Matt Damon's new film Downsizing imagines a solution to over-population is to shrink humans to five inches tall. Director of Film for the British Council Briony Hanson reviews the film which is part midlife strife part speculative science-fiction. A choreographer for sex scenes on stage or on screen is just as important as that for a fight scene - so says movement director Ita O'Brien, who is call...

Director Richard Linklater discusses his new film Last Flag Flying, starring Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne and Steve Carell, about three former US servicemen who re-unite in 2003 for a road trip to bury the son of one of the men, killed in the Iraq War. A recent Arts Council England report into literary fiction shows that sales, advances and prices have slumped over the last 15 years with the...