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Front Row: Mira Nair on A Suitable Boy, Taylor Swift's album Folklore, the film How to Build a Girl, Alberta Whittle and Theatre News

24/07/2020

Mira Nair on A Suitable Boy, Taylor Swift's album Folklore, the film How to Build a Girl, Alberta Whittle and Theatre News

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Mira Nair on A Suitable Boy, Taylor Swift's album Folklore, the film How to Build a Girl, Alberta Whittle and Theatre News

Director Mira Nair on her television adaptation of Vikram Seth's novel, A Suitable Boy.

Director Mira Nair talks about A Suitable Boy, her new six part television adaptation of Vikram Seth's vast novel, and the BBC's first historical drama without any white characters.

Film director Mira Nair on A Suitable Boy - her six part BBC One adaptation of Vikram Seth's huge novel. Set in 1951 in newly independent, post-partition India, its cast of more than a hundred is entirely of Indian origin - the BBC’s first historical drama with no white characters. The book inspired Nair's film Monsoon Wedding, and she has long nursed an ambition to film it. 

How to Build a Girl is the film of Caitlin Moran’s autobiographical novel. We review it alongside Taylor Swift’s surprise album Folklore, released late last night. Film critic Hannah McGill and poet Be Manzini discuss both, and look at the week's arts news: the delay of big summer film releases and the introduction of an specialist afrobeats chart. McGill reports too on what’s happening in her home city, Edinburgh, which should now be busy preparing for the International,  Fringe and the film festivals.

In our series of interviews with the 10 artists who’ve each been awarded a £10,000 Tate bursary in place of this year’s Turner Prize, we hear from Glasgow-based Alberta Whittle. She has a Caribbean background and is in Barbados, from where she describes how her film, performance and collage work focuses on post-colonial power, battling anti-blackness, and the effects of climate devastation, something she witnesses first-hand in the hurricane season.

Yesterday Andrew Lloyd Webber ran an experimental socially distanced performance in the London Palladium and made a speech saying, "Give us a date, mate." Matt Hemley of The Stage was there. He explains the experience, considers when that date for theatres to open - without social distancing - might be, and the precarious state of things...do Chinese developers have their eyes on the West End?

Presenter: John Wilson
Producer: Julian May

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