Jean Toomer's Cane adapted, Bloomsday, Alison Brackenbury, Museums in lockdown

In 1923, African American author Jean Toomer published the novel Cane. It wasn’t a best seller at the time but is now held as a modernist classic and a central work of The Harlem Renaissance. A new radio adaptation is to be broadcast on Radio 4. We speak to playwright Janice Okoh and score composer, soul singer Carleen Anderson.

Today is Bloomsday, when Dubliners celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses, the novel about Irish newspaper advertising salesman Leopold Bloom wandering round the city. As Ireland is emerging from lockdown events are moving online and for Zoomsday actor Seán Doyle is MC-ing a Joycean Punk Cabaret with an alternative presentation of extracts, songs, poems as well as Joyce’s saucier love letters. Seán joins us from Dublin just before the event begins.

Lockdown came quickly and affected arts organisations around the country with barely any warning. Venues closed their doors and hung up the “closed until further notice” signs. But what’s happening behind the closed doors? We speak to Joanna Meacock from the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow and Anna Renton from Penlee House in Penzance.

For one week only Alison Brackenbury is Front Row’s poet in residence. The colsure of museums during Coronavirus has inspired Alison to write new poems about some of those she has visited. Every day this week we will be hearing one of her Museums Unlocked poems. In today’s Alison takes us to Aghanistan via a painting in the Museum of Somerset in Taunton Castle.

Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Julian May Studio Manager: John Boland