Front Row

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

The new Netflix thriller White Lines takes the viewer to the sunshine and drug-fuelled world of 90s raves in Ibiza. A Spanish-British production, it stars Laura Haddock, Daniel Mays and Angela Griffin. For our Friday Review, Rowan Pelling and Gaylene Gould give their verdicts on that and Rainbow Milk, the debut novel by Paul Mendez, which depicts a childhood in the West Midlands where religion and family put pressure on Jesse to repress his sexuality before he escapes to London. Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson continues his weekly live performances from the empty Harpa concert hall in Reykjavík, as Front Row’s Lockdown Artist in Residence. Tonight Víkingur plays Bartók’s Three Hungarian Folksongs from Csík. Have you been to the theatre, or heard a play or watched a TV series and thought 'I could write something better than that' but didn’t know how to get started? To point you in the right direction, Deirdre O’Halloran from London’s Bush Theatre, and stage and screenwriter Vinay Patel (Murdered By My Father and Doctor Who), offer advice about where to start.Director and writer Eliza Hittman on depicting the harsh reality for a teenage girl seeking an abortion in America in her acclaimed new film drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always.Presenter Samira Ahmed Producer Jerome Weatherald Studio Manager Emma Harth

As one of Britain’s best known and loved poets, Benjamin Zephaniah's work has long been featured on the school curriculum. Lately he’s also become a familiar face on television, not least in Peaky Blinders, set in his home city of Birmingham, as well as appearing as a regular panelist on BBC Question Time. But his journey to national literary figure and Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Brunel University has been a remarkable one. There was the relentless racism he faced as in childhood in the 1960s; there was violence within his family, and repeatedly from the police. Zephaniah was involved in crime as a young man. But he knew from an early age that he wanted to be a poet. And he found his voice in a fusion of dub style improvisation and West Indian Music, pioneering live performance poetry on television. Benjamin Zephaniah joins Front Row from his home in rural Lincolnshire for an extended interview with presenter Samira Ahmed which explores his roots as a poet, his throughts on the Coronavirus crisis and its impact on frontline workers, and to premiere a new poem he's written in praise of the NHS entitled Praise the Saviour.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Simon Richardson

Ten years ago, Jude Kelly founded WOW – the Women of the World foundation – aimed at celebrating women and girls and the challenges they face in society. The former artistic director of London’s Southbank Centre discusses this weekend’s WOW Festival in collaboration with the BBC, the first to take place online because of the pandemic.Emma Thompson reads one of her favourite poems. It's by Liz Lochhead, the former Scottish Makar, and called Photograph, Art Student, Female, Working Class.How do you set about writing a musical? In the first of a new series, Front Row follows a team of creatives led by writer Poppy Burton Morgan and composer Ben Toth, through every stage of the process of developing House Fire, a new musical about the climate crisis. With art galleries across the world closed, access to art for pleasure and education is severely limited and sorely missed, but some art organisations and games companies have developed games to help art lovers continue to engage with art at home. Gabrielle de la Puente of The White Pube, a collaboration of two art critics, joins Tom to review the Pompidou Centre’s single-player game Prisme 7 and the online multiplayer game Occupy White Walls. Main image: Jude Kelly Image credit: Ellie kurttzPresenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Julian May

Alicia Keys, the 15-time Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, best known for her hit Girl On Fire and her vocal on Jay-Z’s Empire State of Mind, discusses her early years growing up in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, and her success in the music industry at a very young age, which she describes in her new autobiography, More Myself.Vanessa Redgrave shares her VE Day poetry performance from the recital Voices of Remembrance, cancelled due to the lockdown, and describes the significance of the anniversary to her.Playwright Simon Stephens on his online adaptation of acclaimed stage work Sea Wall, starring 'hot priest' Andrew Scott (Fleabag, Sherlock Holmes), and performed in one room with only three cuts in single take, using a locked-off camera.BBC Sounds recently released a selection of free audiobooks of GCSE English Literature texts, including a wide range, 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 novelist Richard T Kelly offers his guide to the Sherlock Holmes mystery The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle.Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Emma Wallace Studio Manager: John Boland

BBC Director of Content Charlotte Moore – who oversees the BBC’s TV channels, and Stephen Lambert – producer of hit shows including Gogglebox, consider the effects of the lockdown on the TV landscape, and how it will look in the coming months.Will Pound is a virtuoso harmonica player who has been nominated three times for Musician of the Year at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, and who has played with Paul McCartney and Robbie Williams. His new album is a collection of 27 tunes from each of the member European Union member states. He tells Kirsty about the discoveries he's made in this musical exploration, and performs live.Next year the Royal Albert Hall is set to celebrate its 150th birthday, but its CEO, Craig Hassall, fears that social distancing measures could lead to financial disaster. He discusses his concerns for one of the most famous music venues in the world. Presenter: Kirsty Lang Producer: Timothy Prosser

Jeremy Deller is one of Britain’s most celebrated artists, best known for his works We’re Here Because We’re Here and The Battle of Orgreave. Mostly collaborative, his work spans music, documentaries, posters, installations and historical re-enactments. From convincing a brass band to cover techno music for his Acid Brass project, to touring a bombed car from the Iraq War around the US, his work encompasses politics, history and social anthropology. His latest projects include Everybody in the Place, a BBC4 documentary exploring rave culture, and Putin’s Happy, a short film following pro- and anti-Brexit protestors in Parliament Square 2019. Deller won the Turner Prize in 2004 and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2013. He joins Tom Sutcliffe to discuss his career and how he is producing art during the lockdown.Main image: Jeremy Deller Image credit: Jeremy DellerPresenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Lucy Wai