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Thermoman and admirers, from My Hero. | |     | |
Front Rows Art Quiz
We have a winner for our arts quiz. Click here for the winner and answers.
FRIDAY NIGHT
* This season the Royal Shakespeare Company is making a point of staging four little-known plays by dramatists from the Shakespearean period. The company opened with a rare production of The Roman Actor by Philip Masinger. Written in 1626, the tragedy is based on stories of the revenge of the Emperor Domitian after discovering his wife's infidelity with Paris, a leading Roman thespian.
* In 1927, a 26-year-old writer published her first novel, Dusty Answer, describing the unhappy love life of a young woman, and waited excitedly for the reviews. And waited. Then the Sunday Times published a review which suggested that Dusty Answer "reveals new possibilities for literature" and the brilliant career of Rosamond Lehmann began. Front Row looks at a new biography by Selina Hastings.
* Theatre producers have tended to believe that any appearance of the same material in another medium might be ruinous. When the musical Oliver was playing in London, even schools were prevented from producing it. But recently the restraints seem to have loosened. Gregory Burke's Gagarin Way was broadcast on Radio 4 while it was still running in London. Later this year, Les Miserables will become the first musical to be made available for production by schools during its original London run. Front Row investigated theatres aversion to versions.
* Twenty five years ago - to mark the Queen's quarter century - the Greater London Council created a Silver Jubilee Walkway marked by silver plaques on the pavements of the capital. For Front Row, the sound artist Scanner retraced the walk in the Golden light of this weekend's events
* John Major was mocked for Major tucking his shirt into his underpants. Yet a similar sartorial error in the world of fiction gets a man branded a superhero. Spiderman - whose new movie opens in Britain next month - wears lycra tights of a kind which a guy would be unwise to try in real life - as does Ardal O'Hanlon as Thermoman in the sit-com My Hero. So why does our concept of a superhero involve a man who puts his knickers on last?
On tomorrow's Front Row
Monday's programme is a Front Row bank holiday special about the composer Richard Rodgers who wrote classic musicals with both Hart and Hammerstein.
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