Front Row - 29/07/2009

Arts news and reviews. Rachel Weisz takes the role of fading southern belle Blanche DuBois in a new stage production of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, at the Donmar Warehouse in London. The critic Bidisha reviews. David Peace, author of the Brian Clough novel The Damned Utd and the recently televised Red Riding quartet, discusses his latest novel. Occupied City is the second in his Tokyo Trilogy, set in US-occupied Japan in 1948. Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams talks about creating a three-movement symphony from his opera Doctor Atomic, including an orchestral version of Robert Oppenheimer's Act One aria. A major exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park includes rounded and patterned stone works placed outside on the grass, flattened clay hung in patterns on the walls and tables showing maquettes from his studio. Peter Randall Page discusses the way humans seek out symmetry and why one of his pieces was nearly destroyed.