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Front Row: Teenage Dick, Traces review, Olga Neuwirth, Nobel Prize for Literature controversy

10/12/2019

Teenage Dick, Traces review, Olga Neuwirth, Nobel Prize for Literature controversy

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Teenage Dick, Traces review, Olga Neuwirth, Nobel Prize for Literature controversy

A darkly comic take on Richard III with Teenage Dick.

A darkly comic take on Richard III with Teenage Dick, and we review Val McDermid's new TV show, Traces.

Controversy surrounds this year's Nobel Prize for Literature; unusually there are two winners, Polish Olga Tokarczuk and Austrian Peter Handke. Handke has been vocally supportive of the Serbs during the 1990s Yugoslav war including accusing the Bosnian Muslims of staging attacks. Jonas Eklöf, Editor in Chief of Swedish literary magazine Vi Läser, reports on the presentation ceremony in Stockholm today.

Traces is a forensic crime thriller set in Dundee based on an idea by Val McDermid and written by Amelia Bullmore. Molly Windsor (who starred in Three Girls) heads the cast as a technician in a forensic laboratory who is still coming to terms with a traumatic event in her past. Critic Stephanie Merritt reviews the six-part UKTV drama series. 

Mike Lew’s darkly comic take on Shakespeare’s Richard III - “Teenage Dick” -  has its UK debut at the Donmar Warehouse in London.  Samira talks to Michael Longhurst about his vision for the theatre after becoming Artistic Director earlier this year and to actor Daniel Monks about playing this canonical disabled character.

After a century and a half the Vienna State Opera has this week staged its first work by a female composer. Olga Neuwirth's opera, Orlando, is based on Virginia Woolf’s novel about an Elizabethan poet who lives for centuries, never ages and switches gender. The director, the librettist and the costume designer are also all women and the star is a queer cabaret artist. Olga Neuwirth talks to Samira Ahmed about her opera, and its wider cultural significance.       

Presenter: Samira Ahmed
Producer: Hannah Robins

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