Front Row: Archive 2013

With Kirsty Lang.It's been eight years since Lesley Garrett stepped on to the opera stage. Television, West End musicals and Strictly Come Dancing have been occupying her instead. Now she's back with Opera North, the company she began her career with, in a new production of Poulenc's one woman opera La Voix Humaine. She reflects on playing a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and sets a challenge for contemporary opera composers.Feast is a new play created by writers from Cuba, Brazil, America, Britain and Nigeria, and directed by Rufus Norris. It explores the Yoruba culture and what happened to it after slavery created a far flung diaspora. British writer Gbolahan Obisesan and director Rufus Norris discuss the genesis of the project.A new DVD From the Sea to the Land Beyond is a lyrical portrait of Britain's coastline from 1901 to the present day. The film travels through both World Wars, into peacetime and the modern age, and is all drawn from the BFI National Archive. The coast is explored as a pla