Liz Lochhead: Hooked on classics

Once upon a time, there was a famous Scottish writer who decided to adapt a famous Greek play. The famous Greek play was a great success and some time later, the famous Scottish writer found herself at a famous public school. "What do you know about Greek?" the young people at the famous public school said to her. "How dare you translate it!" "But I don't translate Greek," the famous Scottish writer replied. "I adapt it. All you need to be a poet," she told them, "is to be good at your own language."

There is no doubt that Liz Lochhead is "good at her own language". The author of plays like Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off and Perfect Days, as well as adaptations of Molière's Le Misanthrope and Euripides' Medea, she is also an established poet, with volumes dating from the late Sixties. This month sees a pleasant collision of those diverse interests: a new collection of poetry, from 1984 to the present, is just out, entitled The Colour of Black and White (Polygon, £8.99), alongside a new edition of Dreaming Frankenstein (Polygon, £8.99), poems from 1967 to 1984. By happy chance, Lochhead is also currently attending rehearsals for her new adaptations of Thebans from Sophocles' Oedipus, Antigone and Euripides' Phoenician Women; three short plays which will run together, and which will premiere at the Edinburgh Festival before heading for London.

After the great success of her adaptation of Medea three years ago, much is expected of this latest work, which is also being produced by Theatre Babel, the same team behind Medea. But Lochhead is not phased, either by the weight of expectation or the weight of the Greeks themselves. "I wouldn't have had the confidence when I was younger to touch them with a barge pole," she confesses, when she talks of that visit to Eton, and the horror of the pupils there at her daring to "adapt" Greek plays.

"Now, I'm less inclined to think someone else is always right. Now, I think, 'you might be right, you might be wrong'. I get described as 'irreverent'," she continues. "But I don't think I am. I didn't try to do an 'irreverent' adaptation of Molière. I was just trying to make it come alive now - I wasn't 'making it relevant', I was just trying to make it work."

Since Lochhead last produced an entire volume of new poetry - Bagpipe Muzak was published in 1991 - she has moved house. The decorators have only recently finished in her bright and spacious top-floor Glasgow flat, so different from her previous home. (The first time I met Lochhead was through a mutual friend, when the three of us sat on the floor of the comfortably messy living room of her old flat one summer's afternoon, and got merrily drunk on pink sparkling wine.) She has since devoted much of her time to play-writing. Immediately after she had finished writing Perfect Days, David MacLaren of Theatre Babel approached her with the Medea project and once her initial reluctance ("I thought it was terrific but I couldn't see what it was that they wanted me to do") was overcome, she read standard translations of the play before launching herself into a major adaptation.

"Perfect Days was a comedy, with a happy ending; it was lightweight, very modern, very now, with that kind of language," she says, gulping back some tea (alas, when we meet this time, it's a bit too early in the day for sparkling rosé). "So it was strange to be trying to give some kind of voice to Greek poetry because the stuff that we read - that isn't it, d'you know what I mean? There's a certain sense in which the Greek isn't even it - the language holds loads of things I can't access, like what religion was to them, for instance. I can't access that, I can't translate it. So I adapt, I take it for granted that it's for the here-and-now and I just home in on what matters most to me. I try to do the things that I think the Greek plays seem to do," she continues, "to get things happening as quickly as possible and uncluttered with scholarly Victoriana from Greek scholars from the turn of the last century."

In both her adaptations, of Medea and of Thebans, you sense that it is the human aspect that interests Lochhead most. Medea fascinated her because "there's not a week where you don't pick up the paper and either a man or a woman has killed their children - women do it because they're depressed or they try to kill themselves and they can't leave their children to the devices of the cruel world kind-of-thing, and men seem to do it to punish their wives". Oedipus's tragedy is a human one: "It's got to be the greatest play in the world, don't you think? A guy goes, 'I'm going to find out who is causing this plague and pollution in our land and I'm going to drive that out' - and it's himself. Like us, the Greeks would have known it was him from the start, so I'm not telling the story differently. Yes, they believed in different gods and so on, but the Greek audiences were exactly the same as us - the structure of the play, the dramatic ironies are just the same."

This human dimension has marked all of Lochhead's work. There is a compassion, and an anger, and a humour, at the heart of human relationships in both the plays and the poetry. While the former is more public, and sometimes more demanding - Lochhead says she felt "suicidal" while she was working on the Greek plays - the poetry is more private, and possibly more consoling. "There are great big themes in the dramas, which liberated me to be really small and personal with the poetry I was doing," she says. Her new collection has a nostalgic feel, with poems about her parents, both dead, and a passing way of life, with gentle hymns to "The New-married Miner" and "Lanarkshire Girls".

"There's a lot of celebrating of little moments, like the love poem to my husband," she says. "I think it's as you get older and you realise how fragile life is" - she starts to laugh - "don't worry, I'm not fixing for dying just yet. I do feel middle-aged; I'm 55, but not in a bad way. There is a sense that you've got to get a move on, and there are all those things that people speak about, the negative side, like feeling invisible as a woman, for instance. But I quite like that as a writer. You stop seeing yourself from the outside, you stop bothering what people think of you."

But surely, as she has become more successful and more famous over the years, she has become more visible, not less? "Och," she dismisses it, glancing away out of the window as if personal fame was something she could cast outside too. "I hope my work's become more visible but I don't feel I have. I feel I blend into the background more easily - you definitely don't get a chance to flirt as much at parties as you do when you're 30," she laughs again. "But then," she turns quite serious, "I have many, many more men friends now. People are less afraid that you're trying to chat them up - I don't know if that's being middle-aged or being married!"

Her new collection has a ribald section on male and female relationships at the end, based, she says, partly on Punch and Judy. "There's something phallic and mysterious about Punch," she says, "something very rude." It's a hilarious section, but not without a feminist "punch" of its own. "I think a lot of the young women I see nowadays have managed to get to that happy, together, not-giving-a-damn-about-what-other-people-think-stage earlier than I did. Even growing up in the 'freedom' of the Sixties, it was the freedom to please men. It really was." The "irreverent" Liz Lochhead who so startled those Eton schoolboys by adapting an ancient story of a vengeful woman pauses again. "I like the fact that I have more men friends now than I did when I was in my thirties," she repeats, thoughtfully. "I'd like you to put that in. Yes, I have men friends and I like that."

Biography

Liz Lochhead was born in Motherwell, Lanarkshire in 1947. After attending Glasgow School of Art (from 1965 to 1970) she worked as a school teacher ("I was terrible") while writing and publishing her first collection of poetry, Memo for Spring. She has published seven volumes of poetry, including the new Polygon selections The Colour of Black and White and Dreaming Frankenstein.

Her first full stage play, Blood and Ice, was based on Mary Shelley, and appeared in 1982. The highly successful Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off appeared in 1987. The first of her adaptations appeared that year, with Tartuffe, followed by Miseryguts and Three Sisters. In 1999 Perfect Days premiered at the Edinburgh Festival before appearing in London to rave reviews, and in 2001, her adaptation of Medea won the Saltire Book of the Year Award.

In 1986 Lochhead married her husband Tom Logan, an architect. She currently tutors on Glasgow University's creative writing course along with James Kelman and Tom Leonard.