Front Row - 06/11/2008

Presented by Kirsty Lang. Jason Solomons reviews the film adaptation of Noel Coward's play, Easy Virtue, starring Jessica Biel as the racy young American bride who shakes up the upper middle class world of her new mother-in-law, played by Kristin Scott Thomas. At the heart of a new play, The Horse Marines by Richard Cameron, is a canal journey during the Second World War, in which a disparate group of people have the task of delivering munitions from Hull to Liverpool on a barge. In preparation for their roles, the actors travelled to London to experience for themselves the realities of handling a barge, operating locks and pulling a canalboat from the towpath. Kirsty joined the cast as they got on board the 71-year-old Tarporley. The film-maker Morgan Matthews has spent seven years filming intimate testimonies to every single serviceman and woman who has died while serving with the British Armed Forces in the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The result is a landmark 3-hour BBC Two documentary, The Fallen. The novelist Sarah Dunant has watched it and discusses the programme with Kirsty. At the age of 23, Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Florez saw his operatic career spectacularly launched when he stepped into the leading role of Rossini's Matilde di Shabran at the last minute, learning the central part of Corradino in just two weeks. Now the bel canto singer has returned to the role that made his name for a production at the Royal Opera House. He discusses the demands of a Rossini role and how his singing career started out not in opera houses but in the local pub.