Front Row - 29/04/2009

Poet Wendy Cope, composer Roxanna Panufnik and musician David Waterman invite Mark Lawson into rehearsals for their collaboration of poetry and classical music, The Audience, which receives its world premiere at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival Festival in May 2009. Set to music by Panufnik, Wendy Cope's word-portraits of concert-goers - the cougher, the student and the latecomer among them - are performed live by the poet herself. As the curtain rises on the new Hull Truck Theatre, novelist and poet Joolz Denby reviews the venue's inaugural production, Funny Turns. Written and directed by the theatre's artistic director, John Godber, the play focuses on family rifts, economic troubles and rock 'n' roll. What is the continuing appeal of Jacobean drama for modern writers? Compulsion, a one-off ITV drama starring Ray Winstone and Parminder Nagra, tells the violent story of obsession and lust between a rich young woman and a despised older man in a loose update of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's Jacobean tragedy The Changeling. Its screenwriter, Joshua St Johnston, joins crime writer Paul Johnston to discuss the enduring influence of early seventeenth century drama. Cricketer Michael Vaughan talks about changing his focus from sport to art and discusses the method he has used for a new exhibition of work: 'Artballing', or hitting paint-daubed balls at a blank canvas that's fixed to the wall.