Front Row

“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 Producer: Julian May

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 Producer: Hannah Robins

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 Producer: Simon Richardson

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 Producer Jerome Weatherald Studio Manager Duncan Hannant

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 Producer : Dymphna Flynn Studio Manager: Nigel DixHarry Silver.....David Seddon Narrator.....Darcey Halsey Richard Novak.....Tony Pasqualini Emergency Operator.....Adriana Sevan Patty.....Lisa PelikanMain 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 Producer Edwina Pitman

Percy Bysshe Shelley called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. A new series of short plays written as we entered the lockdown aims to make playwrights the unacknowledged reporters of the coronavirus crisis. Playwright April de Angelis and Jeremy Herrin, Artistic Director of the theatre company, Headlong, discuss Unprecedented: Real Time Theatre from a State of Isolation – one of the first artistic responses to pandemic.The latest contribution to Front Row's occasional new series of audio diaries from Britain’s cultural leaders - revealing the work they are currently doing do ensure their institution will still be able to opens its doors once the coronavirus crisis ends - comes from Abigail Pogson, Managing Director of Sage Gateshead.Bangladeshi filmmaker Rubaiyat Hossain is a rising star on the international film circuit. Her new film, Made In Bangladesh, looks at one woman’s fight to unionize her garment factory co-workers after a fatal workplace fire. It will be streamed as part of the digital return of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival after the festival’s early closure in March. Rubaiyat joins Front Row to talk about her film which shines a light on the women working in an industry which powers the Bangladesh economy.Martin Green is a composer, accordion player, electronic experimentalist, and one third of award-winning band Lau. He’s on the bill for this weekend’s Bristol Takeover Online. The event has been organised to raise money for Bristol’s music venues and the participating artists. Martin joins Front Row to provide a taster of the music he’ll be performing for the live streamed festival. Presenter: Katie Popperwell Producer: Ekene Akalawu

How serious is coronavirus for the survival for the performing arts long term? As a government inquiry begins this week, it’s expected that the performing arts that serve an audience in a confined space, such as theatre, music and dance, will take the longest to return to normal, and even then some of the damage may be irreversible. Caroline Norbury, chief executive of the Creative Industries Federation, Deborah Annetts, chief executive of the Incorporated Society of Musicians and Julian Bird, chief executive of UK Theatre and the Society of London Theatre, discuss the ramifications of the current crisis on the performing arts.The Night Watch is arguably Rembrandt’s most famous painting. The imposing canvas from 1642, is housed in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and has been undergoing a major restoration since July last year, but work is currently on hold because of the lockdown. The museum recently posted online a ‘hyper-resolution’ photograph of the masterpiece, allowing the viewer unprecedented access to the painting’s finest details. Historian Simon Schama discusses what the image reveals about the painting and the artist.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Hannah Robins

Many TV programmes are on hold during lockdown, but one production house is creating a multi-character series set on board a spaceship travelling through the farthest reaches of unchartered space, filmed in Supermarionation and in Super-Isolation. Creator Stephen La Rivière discusses Nebula-75, starring Gerry Anderson-style puppets. The entire enterprise is being made by a team of three friends in their flat, using bits and pieces from around the flat as props. And it’s proved extremely popular. Folk musician and singer Nancy Kerr tells us about her lockdown online song project for May - A Leon Rosselson Song A Day – and performs for us, live from her home.Did you know that BBC Sounds recently released a selection of free audiobooks of GCSE English Literature texts? The selection includes a wide range of works from The War of the Worlds to The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. As part of Radio 4’s education initiative we’re asking writers to record introductions to the books, and today award-winning novelist Tessa Hadley offers her guide to George Eliot’s novel Silas Marner, the apparently simple tale of a linen weaver in the English village of Raveloe, written in 1861.Mark Davyd, founder of the Music Venue Trust, discusses the progress being made in its campaign to rescue 500 grassroots music venues across the UK that are in danger of going under due to the economic fallout from coronavirus.Presenter Samira Ahmed Producer Jerome Weatherald Studio Manager John Boland

This evening's Front Row is packed: Tom Sutcliffe talks to a poet, a novelist, a graphic artist, a cultural entrepreneur and a dramatist - but he has only one guest. Inua Ellams is all of these. This week the National Theatre is streaming in its At Home series Ellams' play Barber Shop Chronicles. It sold out at the National twice and toured the UK and internationally to rave reviews. It is set in a barber's in Peckham, and in Accra, Lagos, Kampala and Johannesburg. Ellams explains that men gather in barber's shops not just for haircuts but to talk and argue, about being men, about fatherhood, about women and politics.He tells Tom about how he came to this country, aged 12, when his family had to flee Nigeria because his father, a Muslim, was married to his mother, a Christian. An early work was An Evening with an Immigrant, which he toured all over the country, to places where some of the audience was initially suspicious and some, sharing his experience, saw their own experience onstage. Ellams also invented The Midnight Run, taking people on a waking tour through London overnight, with artists and and musicians, exploring the city, he says, 'with the wonder of children in a maze'. He talks too about basketball and Greek and African gods and his collaboration with Anton Chekhov, whose Three Sisters he set in Nigeria in the Biafran War, about home, black masculinity and the way he createsMain image above: Inua Ellams Image credit: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty ImagesPresenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Julian May