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Front Row: Playwright Roy Williams, Poet Fred D'Aguiar, Defending Digga D documentary

25/11/2020

Playwright Roy Williams, Poet Fred D'Aguiar, Defending Digga D documentary

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Playwright Roy Williams, Poet Fred D'Aguiar, Defending Digga D documentary

Roy Williams' new drama Death of England, poems from Fred D'Aguiar, Defending Digga D doc.

Writer Roy Williams on new play Death of England; poet Fred D'Aguiar on his new collection; BBC Three documentary Defending Digga D reviewed.

Roy Williams joins Samira Ahmed to talk about Death of England: Delroy. Just before Lockdown 2, this play’s opening night became its closing night. The understudy Michael Balogun had just stepped into the role. Luckily the press and audience loved it, and the film of that performance will be available on the National Theatre’s youtube channel this Friday. Directed by Clint Dyer, and written by Roy Williams and Clint Dyer, this powerful monologue explores the experiences of a working class Black British man who has been told by his best friend that he ‘will never be one of us’. 

Fred D’Aguiar spent his childhood in Guyana, his teens in South London and now lives in California. All this experience is distilled in his novels, plays and, especially, his many books of poetry. We talk to him about his new collection, Letters to America which addresses his adopted country in poems such as ‘Burning Paradise’ and ‘Downtown L.A’, but also Britain and the Caribbean, with work influenced by Philip Larkin, Derek Walcott and Calypso. 

Digga D is a twenty year old star of the UK Drill music scene on the brink of global fame and fortune. He has also been convicted and imprisoned for planning a knife attack. A new BBC Three documentary follows him as he leaves prison and attempts to return to his recording career. Can he rehabilitate himself in spite of being saddled with a Criminal Behaviour Order that means the police vet his lyrics line by line? And can Drill music escape its connection to gangs and violence? We’ll ask the journalist Andre Johnson, presenter and director of Terms and Conditions, a YouTube commissioned documentary about the UK Drill scene.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed
Producer: Julian May
Studio Manager: Emma Harth

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