Front Row at the Contains Strong Language festival

Available for over a year

A special edition of Front Row from the BBC's poetry and performance festival - Contains Strong Language Since self-publishing a poetry pamphlet in 2020, Donna Ashworth has gone on to become the UK's bestselling living poet of the decade. She talks about her new book, The Art of Being Easily Pleased: Words To Unlock A Wonderful life, and shares some of her new poems. The phenomenally successful musical, Operation Mincemeat, which looks at a WW2 deception operation, began life as a 15 minute performance at The Lowry as part of the art centre's artist development programme. Natasha Hodgson and David Cumming, two of the original members of the team that created the show, discuss one of the musical's best loved songs, Dear Bill, and there'll be a special performance of it. Anthony Almeida is directing a new production of Othello, set in 1980s Britain which draws parallels between the political and military turmoil of that time with those of Shakespeare's 16th century setting in Venice and Cyprus. He talks about the play's language of leadership in challenging times. The TS Eliot Prize-winning poet Joelle Taylor set her collection, Maryville, in a butch bar to explore the lives of four butch lesbians and the underground landscape of queer culture. She discusses the new performance version of these poems that she'll be presenting at the Contains Strong Language festival. Presenter - Samira Ahmed Producer - Ekene Akalawu