Mike Bartlett, Miss Juneteenth film, theatres repurposed as courtrooms, Susanna Clarke - a podcast by BBC Radio 4

Doctor Foster creator, Mike Bartlett, has come up with a new drama for BBC1. Set in Manchester, Life follows the stories of the residents of a large house divided into four flats, and explores love, loss, birth and death, and features some of the characters from Doctor Foster. Nick Ahad reviews.

Channing Godfrey Peoples talks about writing and directing her debut film, Miss Juneteenth, about a beauty queen pageant commemorating the day slaves in Texas were freed – two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Life for Turquoise Jones didn’t turn out as beautifully as winning the title promised, so she is cultivating her daughter, Kai, to become Miss Juneteenth, even if Kai wants something else.

Show Trials: The Lowry in Salford has come up with a unique way to bring in revenue whilst its regular artistic functions are paused because of pandemic regulations and social distancing. They’re going to become a temporary ‘Nightingale Court’. Julia Fawcett, Chief Executive of The Lowry, reveals how it’s going to work and what the implications will be.

Susanna Clarke, who enjoyed enormous success with her novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, talks to Kirsty Lang about Piranesi, not a biography of the C18th Italian artist, but a novel set somewhere he might have imagined. The House is an endless sprawl of halls lined with statues, but it is falling apart, flooded by tides and populated, at first, by just the eponymous narrator and someone he knows only as The Other. An intriguing story of parallel realities, interrogating reality itself, unravels. She discusses her new novel with Kirsty.

Presenter: Kirsty Lang
Producer: Simon Richardson
Studio Manager: Donald McDonald

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