The Re-Visioning of History: Sue Glover and Liz Lochhead

Abstract

It has often been observed that male domination of Scottish playwriting in the 1970s was challenged only occasionally by figures like Joan Ure and Marcella Evaristi, while established playwrights like Ena Lamont Stewart whose Business in Edinburgh, read in 1970 (and discussed in Chap. 4), found difficulty in being fully produced. In that decade, for example, only two one-act plays by her, Towards Evening and Walkies Time for a Black Poodle, were premiered, in a Scottish Society of Playwrights season at the Netherbow Theatre in 1975. This situation was transformed in the 1980s through the emergence of playwrights like Lara Jane Bunting, Anne-Marie Di Mambro, Anne Downie, Sue Glover, Liz Lochhead (who had earlier collaborated with Evaristi on Sugar and Spite (1978), Sharman Macdonald, Rona Munro, Aileen Ritchie and others. Tom Maguire argues that