Lochhead Liz Lochhead: Five Plays

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-78001-401-2
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 360 Seiten

Reihe: NHB Collected Works

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

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 .

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lochhead, Liz

Leseproben

Foreword

The five plays in this book – when cast well and directed by directors whose main, and proper, impulse is to tell the story – seem to work very well with audiences. There is, it seems, life in them. Despite their flaws, they have been, to varying extents, and in, to me, often surprising ways, popular. Oh, not universally of course, but what is?

Because it is (truism coming) from the audience that one learns everything about one’s plays, I now know a lot more about their flaws than I did, as I am lucky enough to be able to say that all five in print here together in this volume have had several diverse outings – professional, student and amateur – over the thirty years since Blood and Ice, the earliest in this volume, was first produced.

I have always tried, once I thought I understood them, to remedy these flaws, rewriting obsessively, often late into the night and generally not even with the excuse of a new production in sight – madness – sometimes finding a solution, but sometimes having later to admit I’ve succeeded only in stamping out some of the raw, imperfect life in the original.

Nevertheless, I am finally willing to stand by these versions of these five plays. All ‘original’ plays of mine.

Only five? Well, this does not seem to be a great cache after exactly thirty years (I was a late starter) in the Scottish theatre. I am, clearly, not very prolific. I’m trying, though, to console myself right now by reminding myself that over the years I have done quite a few more of my own, original plays – honest! – than these five you have here in your hand.

Including, just last year, one I liked a lot! (Perhaps because it’s the most recent?) It is about the very long and very private life of the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan, who died almost two years ago at the age of ninety. The protagonist of the play is his biographer and friend, and it is about this good man’s struggle with the question of what he is entitled to make of the life of another, and about his struggle to keep Morgan alive and creative right up to the very end. The audiences found it very moving – well, it is a great story, a wee play about very big and universal things, and we certainly hope to revive it. There were originally only five performances for a festival called Glasgay here in Glasgow last November.

Though, can I really with any justice call it original or my own? The three absolutely fantastic actors – it’s simply not recastable, this play – were even more involved in the construction of the piece than is usual for me. Oh, the play was all my idea, but so much of the material came straight out of James McGonigal’s Morgan biography, Beyond the Last Dragon, with its author’s permission and generous help. Maybe it was another one of those pieces of my work that should properly come under the banner of adaptation?

For since the mid-eighties, I’ve spent much of my time – most of my time? – in the theatre working on translations and adaptations and, especially, versions of great classic plays for particular, mainly Scottish companies of actors – and, yes, I have very, very much enjoyed this, found my delight and amazement just grow and grow as I worked on the genius of Molière or Chekhov or Euripides. I have always tried hard, of course, to get right inside the original, felt a great responsibility to the play and its nature, but been relieved that these great plays were classics which have had, and would continue to have, many other versions. I always felt, doing this work, perfectly creatively fulfilled.

But I must admit there is nothing to beat the enjoyment, or the scary lonely excitement and the passion – and the mess – of working on your own on a new play of your own.

Writing Blood and Ice, my first play, and the first in this volume, was exactly like that. More of this story later, in my intro to that play.

The next, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off was written for a company, and even a cast, already extant. A company whose style I knew and loved, and with a lot of input from both Gerry Mulgrew, the genius of Communicado, and from that cast, but it was written by me. There was a lot of improvisation went into the staging, but not into the writing. More of that story too later in this volume.

I then worked for a couple of years for a couple of other theatres on a couple of other projects before rejoining Communicado on what was, for me at the time, a mistake. But one that led to me knowing more about what I believed in, how I needed to work.

Jock Tamson’s Bairns, Communicado and Gerry Mulgrew’s 1990 Glasgow City of Culture cast-of-thousands site-specific theatre piece for the vast Tramway, is something remembered by many people as immensely powerful – I’ve even heard ‘the best thing I’ve ever seen’. The music, from the newly created, eclectic Cauld Blast Orchestra, was truly wonderful. Certainly it was visually stunning. Before its time in its poetic, non-narrative structure. A poetry that came out of the rhythm of performance itself.

And I think, had I not been involved, I would have found it mighty impressive as an event. But as I was ‘the writer’ on the project, never had a clue what I was supposed to be doing, was just aware that I wasn’t giving Gerry anything he needed or wanted (not that he could ever explain to me what that might be) – well, all I knew was I was utterly and totally letting him, and myself, down. And after Mary being such a success for all of us too…

This time, I was supposed to write from things that emerged from improvisation during the long, long rehearsal period, but what I remember is being just alternately miserable and totally terrified as the opening night approached, and so I’d stay up all night and write speeches, scenes, scraps, take them in, they’d be read through once by the company and discarded. There’s an old cabin trunk somewhere literally stuffed full of Jock Tamson’s Bairns drafts and scribbles, and I have no more desire to open it – even now – than to open Pandora’s box.

I definitely thought at the time: if that’s writing in the theatre, it’s just not for me. Never again. Which led, a year later, as my courage and appetite recovered, to Quelques Fleurs, the third play printed here.

It was written at all, came out like this, a tight two-hander, a reaction, unashamedly static and all words, all story, all about these specific characters, precisely because of Jock Tamson’s Bairns.

I even put up the money myself and performed as Verena at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe alongside my friend Stuart Hepburn who had been Bothwell in Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off and in Jock Tamson’s Bairns too. A ‘profit-share’, and – this is unheard of! – we actually made a (very small) profit, then were invited by Philip Howard to put it on for a run at the Traverse that Christmas as a very anti-festive show for adult pantomime refuseniks. The just-out-of-drama-school David McVicar (will I have to call him Sir David now?) loved it and picked it up as an easy touring show for his short-lived small-scale Glasgow-based theatre company. Lewis Howden, a then new-to-me actor I’ve worked with frequently since, took over as Derek, insisting that I had been missing an obvious trick with the drama, a plot point I’d been, quite mistakenly in his voluble opinion, avoiding.

When he got his rewrite, two days before we opened, he, temporarily, had his regrets, but I’ve never had any. Big improvement, Lewis, I was the first to admit it.

This is a play about two people, one of whom talks and talks (all year!) to not say what matters to her, until, after all that repressing, out it comes; and one who, in a single day at the end of that year, is taken backwards in time from being incoherently drunk and almost home to what we know will be hell, back to being sober and telling us the whole truth at the beginning of his journey. At the end of the play.

Sound confusing? The interlaced structure, with its two different time frames, one for each character, is, I admit, hard to bring off. A flaw I see no solution for. The audience do seem to catch on fine, though.

The first three plays in this volume are, I think, very different from each other indeed. But the last two, Perfect Days and Good Things, ought to have something in common, as they were conceived as part one and part two of a loose trilogy of popular comedies, romantic comedies, about the lives of modern women as they approached what the women’s mags would have us regard as big milestones – fear of forty, Perfect Days, and fear of fifty, Good Things.

Perfect Days I wrote for the Traverse Theatre and my friend Siobhan Redmond. She was just brilliant in it, although anybody less like Barbs Marshall in real life would be hard to find. Maybe that’s why she enjoyed playing her so much? It toured and even went to the West End for a short run, which was a big thrill. It was translated into many different languages, had several foreign productions – Japan, Finland! – and was on in Poland till last year. There have been quite a few other really terrific professional productions in different parts of Britain over the years. It was a great rep play. Wish I could...