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Front Row: Ruby Sparks, Roy Willliams,The Plane Crash, William Klein

Ruby Sparks, Roy Willliams,The Plane Crash, William Klein

08/10/2012

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Ruby Sparks, Roy Willliams,The Plane Crash, William Klein

Ruby Sparks, from the directors of Litte Miss Sunshine; playwright Roy Williams.

Mark Lawson reviews the film Ruby Sparks, from the directors of Little Miss Sunshine; playwright Roy Williams adapts an Alan Sillitoe classic; and TV documentary The Plane Crash.

With Mark Lawson.

Ruby Sparks is the new film from the directors of the Oscar-winning Little Miss Sunshine, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. It explores the writer's fantasy of having a character come to life. Novelist Meg Rosoff reviews. 

Alan Sillitoe's classic story, The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner, has been adapted for a new touring stage production by the playwright Roy Williams. He has swapped Sillitoe's 1950s Nottingham setting for London in 2012 just after the Olympics. Mark talks to Williams, director Marcus Romer and the star of the new production, Elliot Barnes-Worrell, about re-imagining the story for a contemporary audience - and the art of running on stage. 

The Plane Crash is a TV documentary which delivers what the title says: scientists, pilots and aviation experts deliberately crashed an airliner in a remote Mexican desert, to find out what actually happens in such situations. Writer Henry Sutton, whose novels include Flying, set on a plane, gives his verdict.

The photographer and film maker William Klein, now 84, reflects on a career in which he trained as a painter before working in fashion and street photography. His work is about to go on display at Tate Modern, in an exhibition in which his images are shown alongside pictures by the Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama. 

Producer Nicki Paxman.

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