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Front Row: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Aquaman, Mike Bartlett

Mike Bartlett, Aquaman, Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Aquaman, Mike Bartlett

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Aquaman, Mike Bartlett

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Aquaman reviewed, and playwright Mike Bartlett

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Aquaman reviewed,  Olivier Award-winning playwright Mike Bartlett on his new play Snowflake.

Two new films with comic book superheroes at the centre - Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse and Aquaman - have just been released. Aquaman is DC’s follow-up to their hugely successful 2017 film Wonder Woman, while Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is an animated superhero film which imagines Spidermen (and women) from alternative universes who team up. Critic Gavia Baker-Whitelaw has seen both and gives her verdict on which will come out on top in the battle for the box-office.

Mike Bartlett, Olivier Award-winning playwright whose work includes Love, Love, Love and King Charles III, and on television, crime drama The Town and Doctor Foster, returns to The Old Fire Station in Oxford where his very first play (co-authored) was produced when he was 18. His latest work, Snowflake, written especially for this theatre at Christmas, is a story of a father and his daughter estranged partly because of their differing views on leaving the EU.

Whilst snowflakes might be 'triggered' by the term snowflake -  a pejorative term describing the real or imagined sensitivity of the younger generation -  how is 'generation snowflake' being represented in the arts?  Author and academic Tiffany Jenkins, pop culture journalist Holly Rose Swinyard and writer Ella Whelan discuss the so-called snowflake generation and what the cultural response to it reveals about both the term itself and the current state of the intergenerational relations.

Presenter Kirsty Lang
Producer Hilary Dunn

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