Episode details

Radio 4,13 Jun 2013,30 mins
Kim Cattrall on stage. Cornelia Parker. Brian Aldiss. Gwyneth Lewis
Front RowAvailable for over a year
With Mark Lawson. Kim Cattrall plays a fading Hollywood star in a new staging of Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. Marianne Elliott directs the play, which is set in the late 1950s in the American South. Sarah Churchwell reviews. The artist Cornelia Parker is best known for installations involving the exploding of a garden shed, Tilda Swinton sleeping in a glass case and the wrapping of Rodin's The Kiss in a mile of string. She reflects on her latest exhibition, and a new book on her work. For Cultural Exchange, Gwyneth Lewis - the inaugural Poet Laureate of Wales - chooses a dance routine from the Laurel and Hardy film Way Out West (1937). Novelist Brian Aldiss discusses his final science fiction work Finches Of Mars, which he's published at the age of 87. He also reveals why he has been writing a short story every day for the last year and casts his mind back over a long career that included a brief stint as an erotic novelist. Producer Nicki Paxman.
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