Front Row: Archive 2012

With Mark Lawson, Alan Bennett's new play People stars Frances de la Tour as a former model living in her family's crumbling stately home. The comedy, staged at the National Theatre, focuses on the future preservation of the house, with options ranging from a heritage site to location hire for a porn film. Writer Kate Saunders reviews.Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov - whose books include Death and the Penguin - talks to Mark about how he was almost seduced by the Writer's Union into being an official writer in the old Soviet Union, why his books might not be considered Ukrainian literature by some, and how he was helped by the protection mafia while trying to sell his books on the streets of Kiev.Director Michael Winterbottom's latest film Everyday was filmed over five years and portrays a family living through a prison sentence, with John Simm as the prisoner and Shirley Henderson as his wife. Their children are very young at the start of the story, but visibly age in the course of the film. Writer and critic