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 about gay marriage, ageing and why the win came as a surprise. Following the announcement that the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for UK Comic Fiction is being withheld for the first time in its history, journalist and critic Arifa Akbar joins Andrew Sean Greer to discuss the current climate for writing a laugh-out-loud novel. Presenter: Kirsty Lang
Producer: Caroline Donne.
Kultur & GesellschaftTalk
Front Row Folgen
Live magazine programme on the worlds of arts, literature, film, media and music
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2000 Folgen
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Folge vom 22.05.2018Fleabag's Phoebe Waller-Bridge on Star Wars, Andrew Sean Greer, Comic novels
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Folge vom 21.05.2018Ian McKellen, The Handmaid's Tale Season 2, Bill Gold remembered, Tishani DoshiIan 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 yesterday, aged 97. Publisher and vintage movie poster specialist Tony Nourmand remembers the man whose motto was 'Less is more'. Poet, writer, and dancer Tishani Doshi talks about her new poetry collection, The Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, which was inspired in part by the murder of a close friend. The poems consider how women's bodies are treated, and explore themes of anger, love and loss as well as ways to find hope and strength in the modern world.Presenter: Stig Abell Producer: Rebecca Armstrong.
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Folge vom 18.05.2018Hamlet and As You Like It at Shakespeare's Globe, Mysterious Marginalia, Morris Dance MusicShakespeare'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 across gender, disability and ethnicity. Are these productions a radical new approach or are they back-to-basics Shakespeare? Critics Kate Maltby and Susannah Clapp give their verdicts. The marginalia in the philosopher John Stewart Mill's 1700 volume library is being digitised, revealing an unknown side of this reticent man. We look at the history of marginalia, and consider what our own attitudes to writing on books reveal about their changing significance. Biographer Kathryn Hughes and Bill Sherman, a historian of reading, discuss writing in the margins - and confess to their own guilty scribblings. And...a few weeks into her new job Dundee library assistant Georgia Grainger discovered a secret code in some library books - what lay behind it, and why did her tweet about it go viral? Will Pound is a harmonica and melodeon virtuoso - and dancer. His latest CD, 'Through the Seasons', ranges through the year and the country, from the Cotswolds to Shetland. The album, and his show, is a celebration of the variety of Morris and other folk dance music. Will tells Stig Abell about rapper music (in the pub not the 'hood), clog percussion, and the melodies Border and Cotswold Morris. He demonstrates, playing live in the studio. And there's a special tune for the Royal Wedding, one Meghan could skip down the aisle to.Presenter: Stig Abell Producer: Julian May.
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Folge vom 17.05.2018Joel Meyerowitz, The Girl on the Train on stage, the Famous Women Dinner ServiceAs 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, novelist Ali Smith will be performing a piece of creative prose inspired by the Famous Women Dinner Service, a work of 50 ceramic plates featuring the portraits of historical female figures, produced by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in 1932. Kirsty discusses the significance and the artistry of the dinner service with Ali Smith, Darren Clarke, curator at Charleston, and art dealer Robert Travers.The Girl on the Train, the psychological thriller by Paula Hawkins, became an overnight bestseller and was later adapted into a film starring Emily Blunt as the troubled Rachel who wakes up with a hangover and an uneasy feeling she's seen something she shouldn't have seen. Now it has been adapted for the stage and opens at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds with Jill Halfpenny as Rachel. Theatre Critic Nick Ahad has been to see it. As Hugh Grant stars as the disgraced MP Jeremy Thorpe in the BBC drama A Very English Scandal, TV critic Emma Bullimore charts the evolution of Hugh Grant's career, from romcoms to recent darker roles. Presenter Kirsty Lang Producer Jerome Weatherald.