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Front Row: The Sessions, Kennedy doc Ethel, Polly Stenham and Francesca Segal

The Sessions, Kennedy doc Ethel, Polly Stenham and Francesca Segal

15/01/2013

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, The Sessions, Kennedy doc Ethel, Polly Stenham and Francesca Segal

The Sessions, Kennedy film Ethel, playwright Polly Stenham and novelist Francesca Segal.

Reviews of Oscar-nominated sex therapy drama The Sessions and a documentary about Ethel Kennedy, plus playwright Polly Stenham and Costa-winning novelist Francesca Segal.

With Mark Lawson.

Columnist Bel Mooney reviews The Sessions, a film based on the true story of poet and journalist Mark O'Brien. O'Brien was paralysed by polio as a boy and at the age of 38 set out to finally lose his virginity with the help of a sex-worker. The Sessions is directed by Ben Lewin who himself is a survivor of childhood polio.

The Kennedy dynasty is the focus of a new documentary Ethel, in which Ethel Skakel gives a candid interview about life with her late husband Robert Kennedy. The couple married in 1950, and the film charts their married life together and beyond, including the McCarthy hearings, Vietnam, John F Kennedy's election as president and his assassination, and Bobby own's assassination in 1963. Mark Damazer reviews the HBO documentary.

Francesca Segal, who won the Costa First Novel Award for The Innocents, inspired by Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, discusses her novel which tells the story of the relationship between Adam and Rachel who live in the Jewish community of north-west London.

No Quarter is the latest offering from 26-year-old playwright Polly Stenham. The play is the conclusion to a trilogy which began with That Face, her multi-award-winning debut written when she was just 19. The playwright reflects on how, like the other two plays in the trilogy, No Quarter examines the damaging impact of dysfunctional parent-child relationships.

Producer Stephen Hughes.

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