logo
episode-header-image
Dec 2021
42m 26s

Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, Sarah Phelp...

Bbc Radio 4
About this episode

Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, which transforms a West End theatre into a Berlin night club in the late 1920s, stars Eddie Redmayne as the Emcee and Jessie Buckley as chanteuse Sally Bowles. Alice Saville reviews the show.

Screenwriter Sarah Phelps discusses her new BBC TV series A Very British Scandal, starring Claire Foy and Paul Bettany, which tells the true story of the divorce of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll in 1963, one of the most notorious, extraordinary, and brutal legal cases of the 20th century.

We remember the author Anne Rice who has died aged 80. Rice is best known for her gothic novels, including Interview with the Vampire, which was made into a film starring Tom Cruise. From the Front Row archives from 2012, Anne Rice discusses the sensuality of the vampires in her novels, her parallel career writing erotic fiction and her relationship with Christianity.

Elephants, a lion, a tiger...animals are stampeding across our stages...in the form of puppets, large and small. Samira Ahmed discusses the reasons for the arrival of this menagerie and the role of puppets in contemporary theatre, with three leading puppetry specialists whose shows include The Magician’s Elephant, Life of Pi, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

Presenter Samira Ahmed Producer Olivia Skinner

Up next
Today
Kat Sadler, creator of BAFTA-winning sitcom Such Brave Girls
Bestselling novelist Kate Mosse - much of whose historical fiction is set in medieval France - reacts to the news that the Bayeux Tapestry is to go on display at the British Museum in London next year. Comedian and actor Kat Sadler on her BAFTA-winning sitcom Such Brave Girls, wh ... Show More
42m 41s
Yesterday
Superman is back on the big screen
Superman is back on the big screen for the first time in nearly a decade, we speak with director James Gunn. We preview a season of films at the BFI, starring pioneering black film star Dorothy Dandridge. Best known for Carmen Jones, (her performance made her the first African Am ... Show More
42m 59s
Jul 7
Oasis comeback tour reviewed
Author Raynor Winn is accused of fabricating parts of her memoir The Salt Path, which she denies. We ask Alexandra Pringle, former Editor in Chief at Bloomsbury, how publishers respond when a book's authenticity is called into question. Oasis are performing together for the first ... Show More
42m 25s
Recommended Episodes
Nov 2017
The Secret Theatre, Paul Theroux, Erte, Beach Rats, Joe Orton Laid Bare
A new play by Anders Lustgarten, The Secret Theatre opens at London's Sam Wannamker Playhouse and is about Sir Frances Walsingham- Queen Elizabeth I's spymaster Paul Theroux's latest novel Mother Land is comic work about a ghastly matriarch exerting a poisonous influence on her g ... Show More
47m 37s
Sep 2023
Lucy Prebble
Renowned for tackling big themes on stage, Lucy Prebble made her name as a playwright in her mid-twenties when she wrote the hugely successful Enron. The play, which premiered in 2009 and explored the collapse of the American energy corporation eight years earlier, transferred to ... Show More
44m 40s
Feb 2019
Can You Ever Forgive Me? You Know You Want This, Cost of Living, A Place That Exists Only in Moonlight, Eating With My Ex
In Can You Ever Forgive Me? Melissa McCarthy stars as Lee Israel, the best-selling biographer of celebrities such as Katharine Hepburn, Tallulah Bankhead, Estee Lauder and journalist Dorothy Kilgallen. In the early 1990s - when she was in her early 50s - Lee found herself unable ... Show More
52m 2s
Dec 2020
Marlene Dietrich
Marlene Dietrich: sensual screen siren, political radical, 20th-century sex symbol, and - eventually - septuagenarian cabaret star. Cabraret legend Le Gateau Chocolat, film historian Pamela Hutchinson, writer Phuong Le, and academic Lucy Bolton join Matthew Sweet to delve into a ... Show More
44m 29s
Feb 2023
Lesley Manville, actor
Lesley Manville made her debut on the West End stage as a teenager in 1972, and since then has taken on a wide range of roles on stage and screen, including an Oscar-nominated performance in the film Phantom Thread. She was born in Brighton and first enjoyed performing as a singe ... Show More
36m 54s
Jan 2019
Mary Queen of Scots, Approaching Empty, Leila Slimani, Fausto Melotti, Ride Upon The Storm
A new film telling the story of Mary Queen of Scots and her relationship with Elizabeth I, stars Saiorse Ronan and Margot Robbie as the 2 queens Approaching Empty is a new play by Ishy Din just opened at The Kiln Theatre in London. Set in a run-down minicab office in the north of ... Show More
50m 9s
Dec 2023
The Year of the Doll
In the highest-grossing movie of 2023, Barbie, a literal doll, leaves the comforts of Barbieland and ventures into real-world Los Angeles, where she discovers the myriad difficulties of modern womanhood. This arc from cosseted naïveté to feminist awakening is a narrative throughl ... Show More
45m 46s
Mar 2018
Anne-Marie Duff
Anne-Marie Duff is a stage and screen actor.Born in 1970 to Irish parents, she grew up in a working class household in west London. A shy child and a voracious reader, she took acting classes from the age of 11, but failed to get into drama school on her first attempt. Her second ... Show More
34m 38s
Oct 2015
Suffragette, City on Fire - Garth Risk Hallberg, Wolf in Snakeskin Shoes, Periodic Tales at Compton Verney
The film Suffragette looks at the campaign 100 years ago to gain women the right to vote. It was made with an all-star largely-female cast and crew. How broad is the appeal of this historical retelling? City On Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg has been hyped by the publishers and laud ... Show More
41m 48s
Mar 2020
The Nest, The Truth, The Bass Rock, Cranach at Compton Verney and Home Entertainment Recommendations
The Nest is the new Sunday night drama on BBC1 that raises questions around the ethics of surrogacy as a wealthy couple invite a young woman whose past is not known to them into their lives. The Truth is a French/Japanese production directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda who won the Palme ... Show More
46m 17s