Liz Lochhead was, along with Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Jeff Torrington and Tom Leonard, a key member of Philip Hobsbaum’s influential Glasgow writing group in the 1970s. Her 1987 play Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off is an iconoclastic retelling of the power struggle between Mary and Elizabeth I in the late 16th century: ‘Once upon a time there were twa queens on the wan green island, and the wan green island was split intae twa kingdoms.’ In her introduction to this new version of the play, created for the National Theatre of Scotland in 2009, Lochhead writes: ‘When I look at it now it is clearly fundamentally about Mary and Elizabeth, the passion of these women to have sex and love and marriage – or not – for can they, without losing power? How do you have a full life as a woman and your full independence? All these things women are still struggling with. It’s not as if these issues have been solved, or ever could be. It is, it seems to me, an eternal conflict. And so it remains a great story.’

Nick Hern | paperback |ISBN: 9781848420281