Front Row

Jess Thom is a founding member of Touretteshero, a theatre company that celebrates the inherent creativity and humour in Tourette's. She is taking on Samuel Beckett's Not I, a rapidly delivered monologue spoken by a character called Mouth. Jess explains why the text captures her own experience of living with Tourette's and her mission to make theatre more accessible. "Gaslighting" is a term that sprang from Patrick Hamilton's play Gas Light written 80 years ago, in which a husband attempts to convince his wife she is going mad so that she is not believed by others. It's a trope that's picked up in contemporary thrillers such as Girl on A Train and The Woman in The Window. Novelist Stephanie Merritt and writer and critic Lisa Appignanesi discuss its dramatic appeal. Deep Throat are a thirty-strong all-female choir who blend their voices with percussion to produce a unique sound. The founder Luisa Gerstein and choir member Tanya Auclair discuss how they developed their style and their collaborations.Presenter: Morgan Quaintance Producer: Hannah Robins.

Half a century after Kenneth Clark's ground-breaking television series on the history of art, Civilisation, the BBC has returned to the same subject - a history of visual culture - but pluralised the name and the number of presenters in the new series. Former television critic of the Financial Times Chris Dunkley and writer and classicist Natalie Haynes review.Wendy Cope is one of the country's best-known and best-loved poets, thanks partly to the fact that her poems are easy to understand and often funny. But they're much more than that: the former poet laureate Andrew Motion said of her that "there is a skip in her step, but these are perfectly serious poems". Her latest collection is Anecdotal Evidence and it reflects on marriage, place, contentment and loss.The works of twenty-three female contemporary artists working in China today are the focus of NOW, a new series of exhibitions across the UK. Curator Tiffany Leung and British-based artist Aowen Jin consider the status of Chinese female artists inside and outside China and to what extent they feel they have artistic freedom in the current political climate .Presenter : Kirsty Lang Producer: Harry Parker.

Sharon Horgan, the comedy actress and writer behind Pulling, Motherhood and Catastrophe features in her first major Hollywood film, Game Night. She tells Kirsty about the difference between working on American movies and British television and why series like Catastrophe aren't , in fact, sitcoms. Syrian musician Maya Youssef brings her qanun into the studio and performs from her album Syrian Dreams. Samantha's Harvey's latest novel, The Western Wind, is a literary medieval whodunit with an ingenious construction. She discusses its palindromic form and explains the significance of setting it in 1491.Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Rebecca Armstrong.

A Fantastic Woman is a Chilean film about a transgender woman whose partner dies and she has to cope with his transphobic family. The film has been shortlisted for best Foreign Language film at the Oscars. Rebecca Root, trans actress and activist, reviews.British film director Lewis Gilbert has died aged 97. Critic Jason Solomons assesses his long career with films including Reach for the Sky, Alfie, The Spy Who Loved Me, Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine.In the wake of recent scientific investigations revealing a hidden landscape beneath a Picasso painting, art critic Jonathan Jones and philosopher and historian Jonathan Rée debate the issues raised by digging beneath the surface of a work of art.Dionysis, the Greek god of wine was also patron of the theatre and since classical times actors have always needed to be able to act inebriated. Siân Thomas, Rory Keenan and Sam Troughton reveal the secrets of acting drunk.

We hear about the second series of the American Crime Story television franchise which began in 2016 with The People Versus OJ Simpson. John Wilson is joined in the studio by novelist turned screenwriter Tom Rob Smith. He has written the next instalment - The Assassination of Gianni Versace - which dramatises the events surrounding the murder of the Italian fashion designer outside his Miami home in 1997. Freud and Bacon are at the heart of Tate Britain's latest show, and there is a whole room of Paula Rego paintings,too. All Too Human follows the depiction of the human in figurative art in the last 100 years. John Wilson speaks to the curator Elena Cripps and David Dawson who was Lucian Freud's assistant. Freud's portrait of Dawson is included in the exhibition. Art critic Louisa Buck reviews the show and considers if an exhibition with such a broad theme allows for a more interesting range of work than most.Debut novelist Mick Kitson explains the thinking behind his audacious debut novel Sal, which tells the story of two young girls, sisters, who go on the run in Scotland's Galloway Forest after one of them, in self defence, commits a shocking crime. The novel portrays their attempts to survive in the wilderness based on bushcraft skills acquired from watching YouTube videos.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Julian May.

Jennifer Lawrence stars in new film Red Sparrow as a prima ballerina turned Russian spy trained to seduce her targets. The film is based on a successful novel by former CIA operative Jason Matthews and helmed by Frances Lawrence who also directed Lawrence in the Hunger Games film series. Film critic Anna Smith reviews.David Edgar's adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, starring Phil Daniels, is currently touring the country. April de Angelis has adapted Frankenstein for the Manchester Royal Exchange. Both playwrights talk about how they have brought these science fiction classics to the stage and consider why so many new theatre shows are adaptions from famous books. Paintings deep in caves in Spain reveal that Neanderthals were artists, according to new research published in the journal Science. Professor Paul Pettitt from Durham University tells us how fundamental the making of art is to us and our ancestors.The Diaspora Pavilion at last year's Venice Biennale showcased the work of 19 British artists responding to the idea of the diaspora of their various cultures. Michael Forbes, one of the artists, gives John a tour of a selection of the works now on display in the UK at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Sarah Johnson.

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 collection, that are no longer in copyright, freely available to the public. No major UK arts institution has taken a similar step. Art Historian Dr Bendor Grosvenor has been campaigning on this issue and explains his position.As two biographies of Mary Shelley have been published since Christmas "In Search of Mary Shelley the girl who wrote Frankenstein" by Fiona Sampson and "Mary Shelley" by Miranda Seymour we look at the competing claims and different perspectives that biographers bring to the lives of their subjects. Biographer and critic Kathryn Hughes and critic and editor of on-line literary magazine Boundless, Arifa Akbar, discuss what "rival" biographies reveal about the process of writing biography itself.Grime artist Stormzy took two of the top awards at the Brits and used his platform to criticise the government over its response to Grenfell Tower fire. From an interview with Front Row on the occasion of last year's awards he throws light on what motivates his rapping and his thoughts on grime's place in the awards.

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 Bullimore whether our aversion to spoilers has now gone too far.Boyd Hilton reviews Mosaic, a new TV drama series from Steven Soderbergh, which stars Sharon Stone as a murdered novelist. The HBO series is accompanied in the US by a mobile phone app whereby the viewer can choose from which perspective the plot is viewed. Matt Bellamy, the axeman who fronts Muse and is famous for his searing solos, has said the guitar as a lead instrument is dead. It has retreated into the texture of the music. Front Row plays a lament in tribute to the lead guitar, as it loses its leading role.Presenter: Stig Abell Producer: Julian May.

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 at the figure skating at the Games in Pyeongchang, and Debra Craine, dance critic of The Times, discuss how ice dancing relates to more classical forms of dance on terra firma. Jess Kidd won the Costa Short Story Award in 2016 and that year published her debut novel Himself to critical acclaim. She discusses her new novel The Hoarder about a care worker and her relationship with the belligerent Cathal Flood and the junk-filled house he inhabits.Yesterday the BBC launched two new African language services, bringing the news, and telling stories in Yoruba and Igbo. Wole Soyinka, the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, is Yoruba; Chinua Achebe, author of arguably the most famous African novel, Things Fall Apart, was Igbo. The editors of the new services discuss the importance of Yoruba and Igbo art and culture today.Presenter Samira Ahmed Producer Jerome Weatherald.

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 their picks in a head to head choosing Tracey Emin's My Bed and Nora Ephron's script for When Harry Met Sally respectively. In Spring 1907 the first suffragette play opened at the Royal Court - Votes for Women by Elizabeth Robins. This rarely performed play is being revived by the New Vic in Newcastle-under-Lyme and we speak to adaptor and director of the production Theresa Heskins about whether the play has relevance today. Annie Swynnerton was a suffragist and the first woman to be elected to the Royal Academy of Art. As a retrospective of her work prepares to open at Manchester Art Gallery, Charlotte Keatley gets a sneak preview and explains Swynnerton's significance. Performance poet Kat Francois reads and discusses a poem commissioned by Front Row to mark 100 years since women got the vote. Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Hannah Robins.