Front Row Folgen

Playwright and BAFTA winning screenwriter Stephen Beresford has returned to writing for the stage with The Southbury Child, a co-production between The Chichester Festival Theatre and The Bridge Theatre in London. Stephen joins Samira to discuss his state of the nation play, focusing on a charismatic vicar at the centre of a controversy, in a Dartmouth parish in decline. Hive explores the life of a beehive over the four seasons of the year. Composer Sally Beamish visits the Front Row studio to tell Samira about her concerto for harp and orchestra, with harpist Catrin Finch who will play Pavan from Sally Beamish's score for a ballet version of The Tempest.From the past in Wolf Hall and the present in The State, writer and director Peter Kosminsky takes us to the near future in his new drama The Undeclared War. It’s a cyberwarfare thriller set in 2024, mixing espionage and politics with coding, bots and hacking. Peter joins Samira to discuss the research that goes into his projects, finding new faces, and how to set the drama of coding on the screen.And playwright James Graham on why he thinks the arts and creative subjects are under serious threat in our schools and universities.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Julian MayImage: Alex Jennings as David Highland in The Southbury Child at The Chichester Festival Theatre and The Bridge Theatre, London Photographer credit: Manuel Harlan

Critic Ben East and academic Catherine Love review Rock, Paper, Scissors, a trilogy of plays written by Chris Bush to mark the 50th anniversary of Sheffield Theatres and A Film About Studio Electrophonique, a documentary about Ken Patten's influential home studio in Sheffield.The three separate but interlinking plays will be performed simultaneously on the three stages of the Sheffield Theatres complex – Rock at the Crucible, Paper at the Lyceum and Scissors at Studio. A Film About Studio Electrophonique premieres this week at Sheffield DocFest. The documentary shines a loving spotlight on Ken Patten who built a recording studio in his council home in Sheffield and through his recording and mixing skills provided the launchpad for Pulp, ABC, Human League and many other burgeoning musicians in the steel city. The People’s History Museum has been shortlisted for this year’s Art Fund Museum of the Year prize. It was the Migration: a human story project which wove stories of contemporary and historic migration into the museum’s existing collection that caught the judges' attention. Dr John Gallagher, associate professor of Early Modern History at Leeds University, went to visit the museum for Front Row. Saturday marks 75 years since The Diary of Anne Frank was published. Poet, writer and broadcaster Michael Rosen has written a sonnet to commemorate this and he joins Front Row to give the first public reading and discuss the enduring significance of Anne Frank's book. Presenter: Shahidha Bari Producer: Olivia SkinnerImage: Chanel Waddock as Coco and Daisy May as Molly in ROCK at The Crucible Theatre, Sheffield. Photographer credit: Johan Persson

Rowan Atkinson is associated with a lot of ‘B’s – Blackadder, Bean, bumbling British spies... and now bees. He plays an inept house-sitter in a luxury mansion chasing after an insect in Netflix’s new Man Vs Bee. He talks about this, his iconic characters, and why making comedy isn’t always that fun.Artist Thomas J Price’s Warm Shores, a pair of 9 foot tall bronze figures, have just been installed outside Hackney Town Hall in London to mark Windrush Day. 74 years on from the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks, Thomas joins Tom live in the studio to discuss how his work honours the Windrush Generation while playing with ideas of power, public space and 3D body scans.When the Oscar-winning film director Susanne Bier turned her attention to television, the result was the acclaimed series The Night Manager, followed by The Undoing. She talks about her new series, The First Lady, which explores the lives of the wives of three American Presidents – Michelle Obama, Betty Ford, and Eleanor Roosevelt.Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Emma Wallace