Thebans

by Liz Lochhead

Following her award-winning Medea , Liz Lochhead has revisited the Greek classics and retold the stories of Oedipus and Antigone in a dazzling new Scots-inflected version of the Thebans . Lochhead is a poet, playwright, performer and broadcaster. Her plays include Perfect Days and new version of Molière’s Le Misanthrope and Tartuffe .

Genres: Plays, Mythology

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2004

About the author

Liz Lochhead is a Scottish poet and dramatist, originally from Newarthill in North Lanarkshire. In the early 1970s she joined Philip Hobsbaum's writers' group, a crucible of creative activity - other members were Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, and Tom Leonard. Her plays include Blood and Ice, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1987), Perfect Days (2000) and a highly acclaimed adaptation into Scots of Molière's Tartuffe (1985). Her adaptation of Euripides' Medea won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2001. Like her work for theatre, her poetry is alive with vigorous speech idioms; collections include True Confessions and New Clichés (1985), Bagpipe Muzak (1991) and Dreaming Frankenstein: and Collected Poems (1984). She has collaborated with Dundee singer-songwriter Michael Marra.

In January 2011 she was named as the second Scots Makar, or national poet, succeeding Edwin Morgan who had died the previous year.

Reviews

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

In general I've enjoyed the Liz Lochhead plays I've read so far, and I think she does a really interesting job as an adapter here. Because unlike many instances of adaptation, where an adapter works from a single source text, Lochhead here presents the major incidents of an entire myth cycle in one play--condensing Sophocles' Theban cycle, Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes, and Euripides' Phoenician Women into a single play. This is, perhaps ironically, very Greek of Lochhead because the Athenians wouldn't have the modern mindset of seeing each of these plays as a unique work-in-and-of-itself, but they would have understood virtually all tragedies from their time as variations on a set of pre-existing myths. For instance, each of the three major Greek tragedians gives us an Elektra play, which are all different and emphasize elements of the story according to the preferences and temperament of the specific playwright. What Lochhead does in Thebans is another reworking of a general myth structure, a re-telling of a set of stories about one family, not a specific re-presentation/re-working of a "master's" play.

[Playwright42]

The rhythm of her writing- broken up with tabs, returns, and no punctuation- makes me envious. Even if she does write more about feelings than thoughts.

[Kat · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 really. Man I love these stories.

[Chinook · Rating 4 out of 5]

Saw performed at Edinburgh Festival