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Front Row: Jill Halfpenny in new drama, The Drowning

Jill Halfpenny in new drama, The Drowning

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Jill Halfpenny in new drama, The Drowning

Jill Halfpenny; Theatre Royal Stratford East archive; queer writing through the centuries.

Jill Halfpenny on new drama, The Drowning; the British Library acquires the archive of the Theatre Royal Stratford East; a new book explores queer writing through the centuries.

Jill Halfpenny stars in a new tv thriller The Drowning. Nine years ago, Jodie’s little boy disappeared on a picnic by the lake, presumed drowned, and she’s never been able to accept his loss. Now, out of the blue, she catches sight of a teenage boy and she’s sure that it’s her missing son. Jill talks to Samira about why she likes playing morally ambiguous characters, shares her own personal experience of loss and how grief is a monster you just can’t outrun.

The British Library has just acquired the archive of the Theatre Royal, Stratford East and Helen Melody, Curator of Contemporary Literature and Creative Archives, tells Samira Ahmed about its treasures: scripts, performance recordings, letters, photographs, rehearsal notes, press cuttings and props.  The archive also contains material from the tenures of later artistic directors, such Philip Hedley and Kerry Michael, who notably encouraged diversity and inclusion, Black and Asian theatre, and work made by people with disabilities.  

We mark the publication of a landmark anthology of queer writing, Queer: A Collection of LGBTQ Writing from Ancient Times to Yesterday, which brings together an unusually broad range of voices from across the ages and the globe to form a survey of queer literature. Editor of the anthology, Frank Wynne, will be joined by writer and artist Morgan M Page, host of trans history podcast One From the Vaults, for a discussion about the cyclical nature of attitudes towards sexuality and gender and to highlight some lesser known voices in the tradition from India, Mexico and Greenland.

Presenter: Samira Ahmed 
Producer: Simon Richardson

Main image: Jill Halfpenny in The Drowning
Image credit: Unstoppable Film and Television/Bernard Walsh

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