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Episode details

Radio 4,12 Oct 2017,30 mins

George Michael: Freedom, John Banville, Michael Fassbender, Performance art

Front Row

Available for over a year

Kate Mossman reviews George Michael: Freedom, the film George Michael was working when he died, in which he and a host of A-List names talk about his songs, his career, his relationships and his battles with the music industry. The Irish writer John Banville is the highly acclaimed winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize, The Sea. His novels include The Book of Evidence, Ghosts and now, Mrs Osmond. It's a sequel to Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady. That novel famously ends inconclusively: having travelled to England against her husband Gilbert Osmond's wishes to witness the death of her beloved cousin Ralph, we don't know if she'll return to her husband in Rome or shape some other future for herself. Banville talks about continuing her story and his debt to James. When Tate Modern opened its new extension last year, for the first time the gallery had purpose built spaces for performance art, and as Fierce, the live art festival in Birmingham prepares to open, Front Row invited Aaron Wright, the festival's artistic director and Dr Claire MacDonald, co-founder of the arts journal Performance Research to discuss the current state of the performance art landscape. Michael Fassbender, whose previous films include Hunger, 12 Years a Slave and Steve Jobs, discusses his role as Harry Hole in the film adaptation of Jo Nesbo's thriller The Snowman, in which he plays a detective on the hunt for a serial killer in Norway whose killing spree starts with the first snowfall. Presenter: Stig Abell Producer: Rebecca Armstrong.

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