The County & Little Fires Everywhere; The Archers; Víkingur Ólafsson; poetry to console

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