Front Row

Tracy-Ann Oberman on playing a female Shylock in the RSC's new 1936 version of The Merchant Of Venice at Watford Palace Theatre.As the Oldham Coliseum is forced to close at the end of March, reporter Charlotte Green updates the story of the diversion of Arts Council funding from the theatre to the local council. Actor Michael B Jordan tells Samira about making his directorial debut with Creed III, while reprising the role of boxing champion Adonis Creed in the third sequel to the Rocky franchise.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Eliane Glaser

Conductor Sir Antonio Pappano tells us about his two new versions of Puccini’s opera, Turandot – a revival on stage at the Royal Opera House, and a new recording with tenor Jonas Kaufman, soprano Sondra Radvanovsky and the Orchestra dell’ Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia.A year on from the invasion of Ukraine, Luke Jones hears from some of the Ukrainian performers living and working in exile. He joins Hooligan Art Community, a performance group that started in the bomb shelters of Kyiv, as they rehearse for their new show, Bunker Cabaret. There are two blistering performances on the London stage today: Janet McTeer in Phaedra at the National Theatre and Sophie Okonedo as Medea at Soho Place. The plays' directors, Simon Stone and Dominic Cooke, discuss the hold these stories of two transgressive and tragic women have had over audiences for two and a half millennia, and why they speak to us today.Presenter: Shahidha Bari Producer: Olivia Skinner

Reviews of the new immersive show David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) at Lightroom in London and Korean film Broker, with Larushka Ivan Zadeh and Ekow Eshun.Installation artist Mike Nelson on the art in his new retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London and the challenge of reconstructing such epic work.Plus AI writing. Neil Clarke, Editor of The American science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld, on suspending new submissions after being swamped by AI-generated stories, and why AI could be a serious challenge the way we think about literature.Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Sarah JohnsonPhoto: David Hockney with his work at Lightroom. By Justin Sutcliffe

Nathaniel Martello-White on making his directorial debut with the psychological thriller The Strays, set between a south London estate and an affluent English suburb.Chila Kumari Singh Burman’s show at FACT in Liverpool, Merseyside Burman Empire, references her MBE for services to Visual Art, awarded last year in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, and her experiences growing up in Bootle as the daughter of Punjabi-Hindu parents. Dawinder Bansal’s Jambo Cinema installation, which explored her life growing up in 1980s Wolverhampton with Indian-Kenyan parents, was one of the big commissions at last year’s Commonwealth Games Cultural Festival in Birmingham. Chila and Dawinder discuss making art that draws upon their South Asian heritage.Throughout her career, the distinguished writer Janet Malcolm, who died in 2021, was fascinated by photography. She came to prominence through her journalism for the New Yorker including six years as the magazine’s photography critic. Photography was the subject of her first book and it has turned out to be the subject of her final book, a memoir – Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory. Photographer of the Year Craig Easton reviews.Presenter: Nick Ahad Producer: Ekene AkalawuPhoto caption: Ashley Madekwe as Neve in The Strays Photo credit: Chris Harris/ Netflix © 2023

Hollywood star Michael Douglas talks about his double-Oscar winning movie career, how he’s still learning the craft of acting and about his new film, Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, which is in cinemas now.As the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine approaches, we hear from two artists working in the country under conflict - Oksana Taranenko, director of the opera Kateryna in Odesa and Hobart Earle, Conductor of the Odessa Philharmonic. William Sargent, the founder of Framestore, the visual effects studio behind Top Gun: Maverick and Sean Clark, the CEO of Aardman, the creators of Wallace and Gromit, join Tom Sutcliffe to discuss their fears for the future of visual effects and animation in the UK.Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Harry ParkerImage: Michelle Pfeiffer and Michael Douglas in the film Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania.

Hugh Jackman talks to Samira Ahmed about his role in Florian Zeller's new film The Son, in which he plays a father struggling with his child’s mental health issues. Kevin Jared Hosein, who won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2018, talks about his first novel for adults. Hungry Ghosts tells the stories of the marginalised Hindu people of Trinidad, focusing on a family who, close by a luxurious estate, live in poverty in a ‘barrack’, in the early 1940s.Philip Oltermann, the Guardian’s Berlin bureau chief tells us why, despite it winning Best Film at the BAFTAs last night, critics in Germany are not showering praise on Netflix’s German-language film, All Quiet on the Western Front.And in the light of funding cuts and plans for English National Opera to be moved out of London, the former head of Opera Europa Nicholas Payne and English Touring Opera’s chief Robin Norton-Hale discuss what a strategy for opera in the UK could look like. Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Paul Waters

On today's Front Row, Samira Ahmed talks to stand-up comedian Al Murray about putting the puppets of the political satire TV show Spitting Image on stage for the first time, in a new production, Spitting Image - Idiots Assemble, at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. And she discusses the Oscar and Bafta-nominated animation Marcel The Shell With Shoes On, and a new exhibition of work by the American visual artist, Alice Neel, which opens at the Barbican in London today, with arts critics Hanna Flint and Louisa Buck.Producer: Kirsty McQuire

The Oscar-winning filmmaker Asif Kapadia tells Tom Sutcliffe about collaborating with the Olivier-winning choreographer Akram Khan on the dance film Creature. Originally conceived for English National Ballet on stage, Creature is inspired by Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck and Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein.Today Letty McHugh was announced as the winner of the Barbellion Book Prize, awarded annually to an author whose work has best represented the experience of chronic illness and / or disability. Letty joins us live from Yorkshire, to give an insight into the creation of her Book of Hours: An Almanac for The Seasons of The Soul, a collection of lyric essays and poetry.In Manchester, two cultural institutions reopen their doors- Manchester Museum, now with the UK’s first permanent gallery celebrating the South Asian diaspora, and esea- short for East and South East Asia- contemporary, formerly the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art. Shahidha Bari speaks to Esme Ward, Director of Manchester Museum and Xiaowen Zhu, director of esea contemporary.Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Harry ParkerImage: Jeffrey Cirio in Creature, an Asif Kapadia film, based on an original concept by Akram Khan (courtesy of BFI Distribution and English National Ballet)

Tracy Chevalier discusses a historic Vermeer exhibition at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, the largest collection of his paintings ever assembled including Girl with a Pearl Earring, which was celebrated by Chevalier's 1999 novel of the same name.Bristol Old Vic is collaborating with four universities in the West Country for a major study into audience reactions in the theatre. Do reactions in the auditorium differ from those watching it online? Melanie Abbott investigates, talking to Iain Gilchrist from University of Bristol, Mike Richardson from University of Bath, Charlotte Geeves from Bristol Old Vic, actor Sophie Steer and Emma Keith, Director of Digital Media at the National Theatre. The finely wrought rhyming and metrical poetry of A. E. Stallings has won her prizes in the US, but until now she has not been published in the UK. Manchester-based publisher Carcanet is putting this right with This Afterlife, her Selected Poems. A. E. Stallings talks about living in Greece, drawing on classical mythology, making art out of the minutiae of life, and the joy of rhythm and rhyme.Jonathan Howard of The King's Singers tells us about the recent cancellation of a concert they were due to perform at Pensacola Christian College in Florida, over what the group says were "concerns related to the sexuality of members." Presenter: Tom Sutcliffe Producer: Paul Waters(Photo: Photo Rijksmuseum)

Sylvia is a new hip hop, funk and soul musical telling the story the fight for women’s – and universal – suffrage, through the life of Sylvia Pankhurst. It wasn‘t just the patriarchy she had to struggle with, but her family, especially her mother, the indomitable Emmeline. Kate Prince has co-written, choreographed and directed it. She talks to Samira Ahmed about the story and the contemporary resonances of her show.In 2021, casting director Lucy Pardee won her first BAFTA for her work on the coming-of-age drama, Rocks, which was celebrated in part for the range and skill of its young cast. She's now up for another BAFTA for new film Aftersun, which tells the story of a troubled single father through the eyes of his 11-year-old daughter. She discusses the art of 'street casting' actors for their cinema debuts.Reporter Will Chalk goes back stage at the Brit Awards to meet production designer Misty Buckley, who specialises in creating sets for huge spectacles like the Brits, the Commonwealth Games and the Grammys.Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Julian MayMain image: The Company in Sylvia at The Old Vic 2023, Photographer - Manuel Harlan