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Front Row: Judi Dench, Julian Barnes on Daumier, Ambassadors, Ibsen's Ghosts

Judi Dench, Julian Barnes on Daumier, Ambassadors, Ibsen's Ghosts

23/10/2013

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Judi Dench, Julian Barnes on Daumier, Ambassadors, Ibsen's Ghosts

Arts news. Dame Judi Dench discusses her role in the film Philomena with Mark Lawson.

Dame Judi Dench discusses her role in the film Philomena, Julian Barnes reviews a new Honoré Daumier exhibition, the verdict on TV series Ambassadors, and Ibsen's Ghosts on stage.

With Mark Lawson.

Dame Judi Dench discusses her role in the new film Philomena, in which she plays a 70-year-old Irish woman who is looking to trace her son, taken away from her when she was a teenager. She discusses portraying and meeting the real Philomena Lee, and working with Steve Coogan, who co-scripted and co-stars in the film as Martin Sixsmith, the man who helped Philomena find her child.

Honoré Daumier was a French printmaker, sculptor and painter whose work offered a social commentary on 19th Century French life. A new exhibition, Visions of Paris, explores his legacy. Booker Prize-winning novelist Julian Barnes reviews the show.

Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts is enjoying two very different new productions at the moment. In English Touring Theatre's staging, the sets take inspiration from designs originally made for the play by Edvard Munch in 1906. In Richard Eyre's new version, at the Almeida Theatre, London, the transparent walls of the set provide a stark contrast to the secrets hidden by the characters. Tim Hatley who designed the Almeida's production and Sue Prideaux, Munch's biographer, discuss the different approaches to representing the text.

Peep Show stars David Mitchell and Robert Webb reunite in Ambassadors, a TV comedy-drama series about the inner-workings of an embassy in the fictional country of Tazbekistan. Briony Hanson of the British Council delivers her verdict.

Producer Jerome Weatherald.

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