Free Thinking

Caryl Churchill's C21st Bluebeard, the fragility of a glass girl and other myths reworked in 4 new short dramas. Jen Harvie discusses the storytelling on stage of one of Britain's leading dramatists. Hetta Howes looks back at American author Rachel Ingalls who died earlier this year aged 78. Her novel Mrs Caliban depicts a lonely housewife who befriends a sea monster.The German born US based artist Kiki Smith has produced sculptures, tapestries and artworks looking at pain and bodily decay and real and imaginary creatures in bronze, glass, gold and ink for her first solo UK exhibition in a public institution in 20 years. Gerald Scarfe has just published Long Drawn Out Trip: My Life moving from his early days at Punch and Private Eye to his designs for Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Disney’s Hercules. He's also putting together an illustrated coffee table book Scarfe: Sixty Years Of Being Rude which will be published in November.

Glass, Kill, Bluebeard, Imp 4 short dramas by Caryl Churchill, directed by James MacDonald run at London's Royal Court Theatre from September 18th - October 12th.

Producer Zahid Warley

Laurence Scott looks at the way Dutch writers are addressing history and contemporary life with Rodaan Al Galidi, Eva Meijer, Onno Blom, Herman Koch and Toon Tellegen.

Eva Meijer is an author, artist, singer, songwriter and philosopher. Her non-fiction study on animal Communication, Animal Languages has been published this year and her first novel to be translated into English Bird Cottage, has been nominated for the BNG and Libris prizes in the Netherlands and is being translated into several languages.

Rodaan Al Galidi is a trained engineer who fled his native Iraq and arrived in the Netherlands in 1998. He taught himself Dutch and now writes both prose and poetry. His novel De autist en de postduif (The autist and the carrier-pigeon) was one of the books in 2011 given the EU Prize for Literature.

Onno Blom is an author, literary reviewer and freelance journalist who has appears regularly discussing books on the Dutch radio show TROS Nieuws, has worked as editor-in-chief at the publishing house Prometheus and whose biography of the Dutch artist and sculptor Jan Hendrik Wolkers won the 2018 Dutch biography prize.

Herman Koch is an actor and a writer. His best-selling novelist, The Dinner, was published in 55 countries and sold more than a million copies. His new book, The Ditch, is a literary thriller.

Toon Tellegen is is one of the best-known Dutch writers. In 2007 he received two major prizes for his entire oeuvre. He considers himself in the first place a poet and has published more than twenty collections of poetry to date, among them Raptors. He is also a novelist and a prolific and popular children’s author.

Events put on by the Dutch Foundation for Literature, New Dutch Writing and Modern Culture take Dutch writers to Norwich, London.

Producer: Zahid Warley

Michael Govan, Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art outlines the issues facing museum directors talking with Philip Dodd and an audience at the Frieze London Art Fair. They debate the "authority" of museums, the idea of "great" art and he answers critics of his rebuilding plan.

Michael Govan took over running LACMA in 2006 following his work at the DIA Art Foundation in New York City. The Los Angeles museum has partnered with Chinese-Indonesian entrepreneur Budi Tek to create a new foundation, to which Tek will donate his vast Chinese art collection. Plans also include establishing a satellite museum in South Los Angeles and new Peter Zumthor designs for redisplaying the LACMA collections.

You can find more interviews to download with artists, curators and museum directors in the Visual Arts playlist on the Free Thinking programme website https://bbc.in/2DpskGS

You might also be interested in the new podcast and Essay series from Radio 3 The Way I See It which sees works of art from the collection of MOMA in New York chosen and discussed by guests including Steve Martin, Steve Reich, Margaret Cho and Roxane Gay.

Producer Robyn Read.

Who holds the power? The US activist and author Rebecca Solnit talks to Shahidha Bari about pros and cons of anger, US border patrols, rape cases in courts and shifts in the point of view of Hollywood films. Plus a look at the theme of National Poetry Day 2019 - Truth with the poet David Cain author of Truth Street - A Hillsborough Poem and Fiona Benson - whose collection is called Vertigo & Ghost.

Rebecca Solnit's fourth Essay collection is called Whose Story Is This ? Old Conflicts, New Chapters.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

A 15,000-line epic, Poly-Olbion has inspired Professor Andrew McRae from the University of Exeter and the Places of Poetry project which asks you to pin newly written poems to a modern version of William Hole's map of England and Wales. Why did Michael Drayton leave out Scotland? And what do the modern poems tell us about Brexit Britain? Hetta Howes finds out and talks to writers Pete Kalu & Will Harris alongside Dr Corinne Fowler from the University of Leicester about the Colonial Countryside Project. This has taken 100 children, 10 National Trust properties and 10 writers whose work is being published by Peepal Tree Press and has put the spotlight on stories such as former plantation owner who lived in Speke Hall in Liverpool.

Find out more information on https://www.placesofpoetry.org.uk and https://colonialcountryside.wordpress.com/ and http://poly-olbion.exeter.ac.uk/

This episode is one of a series of conversations - New Thinking - produced in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UK Research & Innovation.

Producer: Debbie Kilbride

Rana Mitter talks to Jason Webster, Ed Morales, Iain Sinclair and Iwona Blazwick, about the shifting concepts of identity in the Ibero-Latin world, from the days before Spain was a single Spain, through the indigenous and the artistic of South America, to the multiplicity of ethnic and cultural identities represented in the US by the neologism "Latinx".

"They do not come into our house in jackboots... This is not totalitarianism. This is a new kind of power." Shoshana Zuboff discusses surveillance capitalism, the links between Pokémon Go and BF Skinner, the behavioural psychologist she studied with at Harvard in the 1970s.

If you look up Free Thinking and Learning from Sweden you can hear about British and Swedish cultural exchange from Abba to Ikea https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09z68sn

Shoshana Zuboff's book is called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Films about emotions from anger and joy to the manipulation of adverts made at our Free Thinking Festival can be found on https://www.bbc.com/ideas/playlists/free-thinking-2019. The discussions include a debate about the manipulative power of advertising How They Manipulate Our Emotions https://bbc.in/2WYmOlO and you can see a film about it on bbc.com/ideas/videos/how-ads-manipulate

Produced by Luke Mulhall

Comedian Sofie Hagen, Colombian novelist Héctor Abad, political journalist Isabel Hardman, artistic director John O'Shea & psychologist Dr Colette Hirsch, who are behind a new exhibition about anxiety, join Shahidha Bari.

On Edge: Living in an Age of Anxiety is a new exhibition at Science Gallery London until 19th January 2020 which combines art, design, psychology and neuroscience drawing on research from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London.

Comedian Sofie Hagen has explored her experience of anxiety in many of her shows notably Shimmer Shatter which described with brutal honesty what she calls her outsider status and why she's been known to hide public toilets so she doesn't have to deal with other people. Her new show The Bumswing runs until June 14th 2020. Tour details and her podcast Made of Human Podcast on https://www.sofiehagen.com

Political journalist Isabel Hardman has written about going through a severe bout of anxiety 2 years ago which forced her to take a lengthy break from her job at the Spectator. As she puts it herself, "my mind was full of words flying angrily around like startled gulls." She argues that Government policy should do much more to tackle the issue of mental health care. Her latest book is called Why We Get the Wrong Politicians.

Born and brought up in Colombia, journalist and novelist Héctor Abad has written a memoir called Oblivion about his late father who was killed by right wing paramilitaries in 1987.

In the Free Thinking archives - Anxiety and the Teenage Brain hears a student, university counsellor and psychologist Stephen Briers from TV's Teen Angels give their take on anxiety https://bbc.in/2D4WPRV

Producer: Paula McGinley

Matthew Sweet is joined by guests including comedian Alexei Sayle, TV presenter Janet Ellis and film critics Adam Mars Jones and New Generation Thinker Iain Smith to look at remakes and new interpretations of the '80s from Stephen King's 1986 horror novel IT - now in cinemas as It Chapter Two, Rambo - first seen on screen in 1982 and now the inspiration for Last Blood and My Beautiful Launderette, which Hanif Kureishi has adapted for a UK theatre tour this Autumn - to TV series like Stranger Things.

Second Sight The Selected Film Writing of Adam Mars-Jones is out now.

The Film of My Beautiful Launderette has been reissued on DVD by the BFI and a theatrical version by Hanif Kureishi opens at the Curve Leicester Sept 20th and travels to Cheltenham, Leeds, Coventry, Birmingham.

Alexei Sayle's books include Thatcher Stole My Trousers. During the 1980s he performed with the Comic Strip, in the Secret Policeman's Other Ball, The Young Ones and various other TV series and movies including Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Revelation Of The Daleks. Doctor Who and Whoops Apocalypse. His series Alexei Sayle's Imaginary Sandwich Bar can currently be heard on BBC Radio 4.

Janet Ellis presented TV series Blue Peter and Jigsaw between 1979 and 1987. Her second novel How It Was is out now.

Dr Iain Smith teaches film at Kings College, London and is the author of The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema.

Producer: Craig Templeton Smith

Lauren Elkin, Lisa Appignanesi and biographer Ben Moser debate Susan Sontag's life and ideas with presenter Laurence Scott, focusing in on her 1966 essay collection, which argued for a new way of approaching art and culture.

Ben Moser is the author of Sontag: Her life and work which is out now.

You can hear more from Lisa including her BBC Radio 3 interview with Susan Sontag if you search for the Sunday Feature Afterwords: Susan Sontag

Producer: Luke Mulhall