Front Row

The playwright Mike Bartlett is busy. The 47th, his dark comedy about the next presidential race, with Bertie Carvel giving an uncanny performance as Donald Trump is about to open at the Old Vic in London. So too is Scandaltown, his modern day Restoration comedy about social ambition, featuring characters with names such as Hannah Tweetwell and Freddie Peripheral. And he has another play, a love triangle, Cock, in the West End. Mike talks to Tom Sutcliffe about the appeal of writing gags, blank verse and characters who take control.Hannah Hodgson's latest volume of poetry is '163 Days' in which she looks back in verse over her six months in hospital as teenager suffering from a severe and undiagnosed disease. Her poems are juxtaposed with her medical notes. The illness, which later proved to be mitochondrial encephalopathy, is incurable and she explores, in her poems, living with a terminal condition.To mark the BBC's Art That Made Us season, Front Row invites artists from across the nations of the UK to choo