Front Row

Director Andrew Patterson joins us to talk about new movie The Vast of Night, the story of a small New Mexico town disturbed by lights in the sky and unidentified radio signals which is a loving homage to the sci-fi TV of the 1950s. The low budget, high concept film, which is Patterson’s directorial debut, is available on Amazon Prime.

Writers Timberlake Wertenbaker and Winsome Pinnock talk about how white and black writers engage with race, and the importance and responsibility of white writers to talk about race and racism.

Mark Damazer is the newly announced Chair of the Booker Prize Foundation which oversees the management of the Booker Prize and the International Booker Prize, for fiction in translation. After the Booker judges’ controversial decision in 2019 to split the main award between two authors, Bernadine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood, he joins us to talk about the Foundation’s plans for the year ahead.

It’s the 31st anniversary today of the massacre of thousands of protestors in Tiananmen Square. Writers, musicians and writers, such as Bei Dao, Duo Duo and singer Cui Jian, were involved in the movement for Democracy in China, and Front Row briefly reflects on their role.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

Michael Sheen and David Tennant play themselves in Staged, a new BBC One series of six 15-minute Zoom dramas, in which they play two furloughed actors in lockdown. Comedian and writer Viv Groskop reviews.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, has released a new online portal to facilitate conversations about race and racism in America. Beverly Morgan-Welch, Director of External Affairs at the Museum, discusses the project, Talking About Race.

The poets Alemu Tebeje and Chris Beckett, the editors and translators of Songs We Learn from Trees, discuss the very first anthology of Ethiopian poetry to be published in English. With poems written in Amharic over the past two centuries it reveals a rich and various and witty tradition - of boasts, war cries, poems about wealth, famine, religion, politics and love.

Main image: David Tennant in Staged

Presenter Samira Ahmed

As public protests continue nationally and internationally, award-winning American artist Carrie Mae Weems - whose work explores race, identity, and power - joins Front Row to discuss the role of art in response to tragedies such as the death of George Floyd.

Liz Lochhead, the former Makar, or National Poet of Scotland, performs a new poem written during the lockdown, called The Spaces Between.

How will museums reflect the current crisis in the future? What will they have on display and in their archives to record the way we’re living now? We find out what the Wellcome Collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum are collecting.

And we conclude our series of specially commissioned introductions to some of the books on the GCSE English literature syllabus with novelist and games writer Naomi Alderman, whose feminist sci fi novel The Power won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017. So it’s appropriate that tonight she’ll be talking about about HG Wells’ trailblazing science fiction classic The War of the Worlds.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Sitting In Limbo is a new BBC drama telling the story of one man’s entanglement with the Windrush scandal where legal migrants, some of whom had lived here for decades, were denied legal rights, threatened with deportation and some were wrongly deported. The drama tells the story of Anthony Bryan who came to the UK from Jamaica with his mother at the age of 8. Gaylene Gould reviews.

Joanna Briscoe made her name with Mothers and Other Lovers and Sleep With Me which was adapted by Andrew Davies for ITV. Her new novel is Seduction and is the story of an artist who is hounded by her estranged mother, has a difficult relationship with her own teenage daughter and goes into therapy – falling madly in love with her female therapist.

The death of the artist Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, known as Christo has been announced. Working with his wife Jeanne-Claude, the pair were known for their monumental public works which involved wrapping architectural creation such as the Reichstag - the German Parliament in Berlin, the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris, and New York’s Central Park. Critic Louisa Buck discusses his work.

The Uncertain Kingdom project is an anthology of twenty new short films by twenty directors reflecting contemporary Britain. Kirsty talks to producer Georgia Goggin and director David Proud, whose film Verisimilitude is about a disabled actress who advises an obnoxious star on how to perform with a disability for his latest role.

Main image: Patrick Robinson in Sitting in Limbo

Presenter: Kirsty Lang

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own. On the eve of Radio 4’s adaptation of Woolf’s totemic study in the treatment of women across the generations we talk to Indira Varma who stars.

The DJ Mr Switch, aka Anthony Culverwell, discusses Gabriel Prokofiev’s classical composition, Concerto for Turntables, released this week. Mr Switch performed it at the BBC Proms in 2011 to great acclaim, and at home at his turntables the DJ explains and demonstrates the art of turntablism.

Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson continues his weekly live performances from the empty Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik, as Front Row’s Lockdown Artist in Residence. Tonight Víkingur plays Chopin’s Prelude in B Minor, a piece very special to the composer.

For Front Row's Friday review, Bong Joon Ho's 2013 film Snowpiercer never had a full cinematic release in this country but won critical acclaim. Now Netflix have produced a new series based on the story. And The Lockdown Plays is a new podcast for charity involving some of the country's top actors and playwrights such as Caryl Churchill and Clint Dyer. Critics Naima Khan and Ryan Gilbey give their verdicts on both.

Tomorrow will be Bristol Old Vic’s 254th birthday. Usually anyone living in Bristol can perform on the stage of the oldest theatre in the country on its birthday. This, sadly, has had to now move online. Tom Morris talks about the Bristol Arts Channel, which opens tonight with the streaming of the Bristol Old Vic production of Messiah. The channel involves venues all over the city offering the audience a night out in Bristol.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed

Social distancing has become one of the key measures for controlling coronavirus, but implementing it is creating an existential threat to arts venues like theatres, museums, galleries, independent music venues and concert halls. With such vastly reduced capacity - as much as 90% - can venues ever make the finances stack up, and what is lost when the audience, and performers, must be so far apart?

Despite the restrictions, some venues are starting to find ways of making it work. John Wilson goes to the Wigmore Hall where they're beginning live concerts on Radio 3 next week. Violinist Alina Ibragimova performs in the hall - the first instrument played there in ten weeks - and speaks to John alongside Director of the Wigmore Hall John Gilhooly about what it means to be creating live performance again amidst such huge financial uncertainty.

Alan Davey tells us what to expect from this years' Proms.

Across Europe some museums and galleries are already open. Christina Haak, deputy director of the Berlin State Museums, which include the Pergamonmuseum, Neues Museum and the Alte Nationalgalerie, tells us what it was like welcoming audiences again.

Robert Hastie, Director of Sheffield Theatres, reports on his plans for Shakespeare in the Park this summer, which have the aim of keeping some theatre alive in the city.

And Dominique Frazer, who runs the Boileroom indie music venue in Guildford, discusses how social distancing is impossible in their venue which is all about getting close to bands and each other.

Presenter: John Wilson

Bestselling author John Grisham on his new novel Camino Winds, a sequel to Camino Island, in which a coterie of crime authors discover one of their colleagues has been murdered during a hurricane. There are currently over 300 million John Grisham books in print worldwide, including A Time To Kill, The Firm, The Pelican Brief and The Client.

With museums and galleries in Europe announcing their preparations for re-opening on a limited scale, how do things look in the UK? Ros Kerslake, CEO of the Heritage Fund, discusses the challenges being faced by institutions across the country and their financial situation with Dr Kathy Talbot, Trustee of the Tenby Museum and Art Gallery in Wales.

While the Covid 19 crisis has led to physical theatres going dark, many theatre companies have released work online for anyone to watch in the comfort of their own homes, often for free. What makes some plays, monologues and adaptations successful? Sarah Crompton joins Tom to discuss the best of what's available online.

Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe

Tracee Ellis Ross is the daughter of Diana Ross and in 2017 became the first African-American woman to win a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a TV Comedy since 1983, for her sitcom Black-ish. She tells us about her new film The High Note, in which she plays a pop superstar looking to reinvigorate her career.

Pushkin Press has partnered with Walter Iuzzolino from Channel 4’s ‘Walter Presents’ on a collaboration of timeless novels with strong international appeal. Walter discusses the first title in the partnership, The Mystery of Henri Pick by French writer David Foenkinos, about the importance of curatorship in a global world of mass content and his ambition to promote his series of foreign language novels into must-haves as compelling as box sets.

London’s Southbank Centre says it’s at risk of closure until at least April 2021 due to the economic impact of the Coronavirus, and is calling on the Government to help the cultural sector survive. To discuss the extent of the crisis facing the organisation and the arts, Kirsty is joined by Southbank Centre CEO, Elaine Bedell.

As part of Radio 4’s support for students in lockdown we’ve been asking writers to record new introductions to some of the books on the GCSE English literature syllabus. Today we’re going to hear from Sara Collins who won the 2019 Costa First Novel Award for The Confessions of Frannie Langton. She’s sharing her thoughts on Frankenstein by the English author Mary Shelley.

Presenter Kirsty Lang

AM Homes won the Women's Prize for Fiction 2013 for her novel May We Be Forgiven, beating off stellar competition from Hilary Mantel, Kate Atkinson, Barbara Kingsolver and Zadie Smith.

Kirsty Lang has been finding AM's darkly comic novels and short stories perfect reading for the lockdown. Her writing penetrates contemporary America, with characters who are pulled apart by accidents, trauma, jealousy, chance encounters and who must examine their lives in order to start over again. The stories are wickedly funny, relentless in their pace and often redemptive.

In this extended Front Row interview, AM talks to Kirsty about recovering from Covid-19, growing up in Washington DC and her fascination with Nixon; why she loves to write male protagonists, her lack of inhibition when writing sex scenes - and the challenges of satirising our strange times.

She also reads from and talks about her memoir, The Mistress's Daughter, which tells the story of how she was given up for adoption on the day she was born. Her birth parents were a twenty-two year old woman and an older married man. Thirty-one years later, her birth mother tracked her down.

Presenter : Kirsty Lang

Harry Silver.....David Seddon

Main image above: A. M. Homes

For Front Row’s Friday review, the author Patrice Lawrence and film critic Hannah McGill consider two new options to stream. Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng’s bestselling novel set in 1997 suburban America and raising questions around class and race, has been made into a drama on Amazon Prime, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. The Icelandic director Grímur Hákonarson won acclaim for his film Rams. In his latest film The County, he tells the story of a woman who singlehandedly takes on corruption in her local farmers’ cooperative. The film is available on Curzon Home Cinema.

As new episodes of The Archers return to Radio 4, we talk to James Cartwright who plays PC Harrison Burns about ways the world’s longest running soap is responding to the challenges of Coronavirus on and off air.

President Macron has announced a series of measures to help the culture sector in France recover from the effects of Covid-19. French author and cultural commentator Agnes Poirier explains how they will work and whether any lessons can be learned for sustaining the cultural landscape in Britain.

Emilia Clarke has a new online project in which she asks leading actors to perform poems to help us with the psychological difficulties of the pandemic. The poems are chosen from William Sieghart’s Poetry Pharmacy anthologies which prescribe poems ‘for the heart, mind and soul’, and have been performed so far by Helena Bonham Carter, Idris Elba, Stephen Fry and Andrew Scott. William Sieghart joins us to discuss poetry's pwer to soothe.

And Front Row’s artist in residence pianist Víkingur Ólafsson plays La Damoiselle élue by Claude Debussy, live from Reykjavik’s Harper concert hall.

Presenter: Kirsty Lang