Five plays from the the makar (national poet) of Scotland, one of the country’s best-known (and best-loved) living playwrights.
Liz Lochhead is the author of many highly inventive original plays, adaptations and translations, all crafted with her special blend of the vividly colloquial and the energetically poetic. This volume brings together five of her best original plays ranging over three decades and several, contrasting styles.
Her first play, Blood and Ice (1982), is about the creation of Frankenstein, and weaves a spider’s web of connections between the literary monster and Mary Shelley’s own turbulent life.
The modern classic Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off(1987) retells the familiar tale of enmity between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, with Lochhead’s own brand of ferocious iconoclasm and boundless wit.
Quelques Fleurs (1991) is a portrait of a marriage, both funny and tragic, and told through interlaced monologues.
The last two plays, Perfect Days (1998) and Good Things (2004), mark a woman’s fear of turning, respectively, forty and fifty. In the first, Barbs, 39, a celebrity hairdresser, determines to do something to drown out the ticking of her biological clock. In the second, Susan, 49, sets out to find love the second (or is it third or fourth?) time round…
This rich collection of plays carries a new and candid introduction by the author, specially written for the volume.
‘Funny, feisty, female, full of feeling… Liz Lochhead possesses the deeply Scottish qualities of independence, inquisitiveness and inventiveness’ Carol Ann Duffy
About the author
Liz Lochhead is a poet, playwright, performer and broadcaster.
Her original stage plays include Thon Man Molière, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, Blood and Ice, Good Things and Perfect Days. Her many stage adaptations include Dracula, Molière’s Tartuffe, Miseryguts (based on Le Misanthrope) and Educating Agnes (based on L’École des Femmes); as well as versions of Medea by Euripides (for which she won the Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2001), and Thebans (adapted mainly from Sophocles' Oedipus and Antigone).
Her collections of poetry include Dreaming Frankenstein, The Colour of Black & White, A Choosing (Selected Poems), Fugitive Colours and True Confessions, a collection of monologues and theatre lyrics. She served a five-year term as Scotland's Makar, or National Poet, from 2011 till 2016, and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2015. She won the Sunday Herald Scottish Culture Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017, and the 2023 Saltire Society Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to Scottish literature .
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