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Front Row: Crazy Rich Asians, Touching the Void, Novels about the super rich, Leeds Piano Competition

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13/09/2018

Crazy Rich Asians, Touching the Void, Novels about the super rich, Leeds Piano Competition

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Crazy Rich Asians, Touching the Void, Novels about the super rich, Leeds Piano Competition

Touching the Void at the Bristol Old Vic, Crazy Rich Asians.

Tom Morris on Touching the Void; Constance Wu, star of Crazy Rich Asians; novels about the super rich; and Murray McLachlan on the Leeds Piano Competition. With Kirsty Lang.

Touching The Void. Memoir, documentary, now theatre performance - at the Bristol Old Vic. Written by David Greig , it's an adaptation of Joe Simpson's bestselling 1988 mountaineering memoir and the subsequent 2003 docu-drama detailing Simpson's disastrous 1985 attempt to make a first ascent of a mountain in the Andes. Theatre director Tom Morris talks to Kirsty about the challenges of transferring the story to the stage. And as the Bristol Old Vic prepares to re-open after a major refurbishment, he describes how the new design aims to mark the theatre's history and slave trade past and welcome in new audiences.

Crazy Rich Asians is a box office hit in the US about a young Chinese-American woman who goes to a wedding in Singapore and encounters the fabulously wealthy Chinese family of her boyfriend. Its star Constance Wu talks to Kirsty about the issues it raises on the difference between Asian and American culture and the tricky question of stereotyping.

Crazy Rich Asians is based on a best-selling book Kevin Kwan of the same name satirizing Singapore's super-rich. Depictions of the wealthy in novels is nothing new as literary critic Toby Lichtig explains as he gives is a potted history of rich-lit.

As this year's Leeds International Piano Competition reaches the finals without a British finalist, concert pianist Murray McLachlan, Chair of the European Piano Teachers Association (UK) and Artistic Director of Chetham's International Summer School and Festival for Pianists, discusses whether British piano teaching is making the grade.

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