A puppet show by Margaret Atwood and new play by David Greig will premiere as part of the BBC’s Culture in Quarantine festival.
Atwood will join presenter Mary Beard on Front Row Late via video link, using her own puppet creations to illustrate a story by Edgar Allan Poe.
Greig’s play was intended to run at Scotland’s Pitlochry Festival Theatre but will now run on Radio 3.
The Battersea Arts Centre’s Beatbox Academy production of Frankenstein: How to Make A Monster will also be screened, with the performance shown alongside documentary footage.
Further theatre programming includes six Royal Shakespeare Company plays from recent years, including Christopher Eccleston and Niamh Cusack in Macbeth and Hugh Quarshie as Othello.
These join the previously announced screenings of Mike Bartlett’s Albion and Emma Rice’s production of Wise Children.
As the National Gallery was forced to cut short its Titian exhibition, a film will explore the artist’s work. Titian: Behind Closed Doors investigates the Renaissance master and features scenes of National Gallery director Gabriel Finaldi shutting the exhibition soon after it opened.
A four-part series will explore the collections of some of the country’s most popular museums. Tate Modern, Tate Britain, the British Museum, and the Ashmolean in Oxford will feature in Museums in Quarantine on BBC Four.
The opera and dance offerings include Balletboyz: Deluxe, Northern Ballet’s Dracula and Opera Mums with Bryony Kimmings, in which the performance artist explores her feelings about opera, before writing, casting and performing her own.
BBC Director-General Tony Hall says: "It’s important during this period that we maintain access not just to news and information, but to the arts and culture. For many people they are a valuable part of their lives and a way of stimulating imagination, thought, and escapism. It’s a vital part of who we are as individuals and part of our identity as a nation.”
The BBC has also announced a Culture in Quarantine Fund, as part of a collaboration with Arts Council England, which will commission 25 new works by independent artists in response to the coronavirus outbreak around the world.
