The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Liz Lochhead
Byre Theatre, St Andrews, April 23
Liz Lochhead doesn’t undersell her uniquely evocative way with words when she jokes about this show as being an “aggravated poetry reading.”
For the prolific and versatile Lanarkshire poet, playwright and former Scots Makar, Somethings Old, Somethings New is a bit of fun, a chance to present her work before an audience with the musical backing of saxophonist Steve Kettley.
“It’s a funny show, but it’s not laugh-aminute,” she explains ahead of its appearance at the Byre as part of the That’s Fife Comedy Festival.
“There are some funny pieces, there are some which are rude and raunchy, and there are some which are more sweet and memorable,” she adds.
“It’s storytelling poetry, there are characters in it, and some songs – but I can’t sing, so we have to get round that as best we can…”
Lochhead says she’s known Kettley “forever”, or at least ever since he worked with the Communicado theatre company, which staged her play Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off 30 years ago. And the new production owes a debt to their connection to another Scots wordsmith.
“This show came about because of our dear mutual friend Michael Marra,” she says.
“After Michael died in 2012 there was a celebration of his work at Celtic Connections in Glasgow the following January.
“I had written a wee elegy for Michael which we wanted to drop into a song during the show, so Steve agreed to play saxophone alongside it.
“I invited him to play it again when I had a show at the Assembly Rooms during the Edinburgh Festival, to take the bare look off me, and we continued to write wee musical things together and developed them into a show.”
She describes the pair’s half a dozen shows a year as a hobby but that underplays a little what they’ve already achieved together.
Most significantly, the album The Light Comes Back was recorded in 2015 at An Tobar on the Isle of Mull and released last year, a collaboration with the Dundee-based band The Hazey Janes – a group which counts the Dundonian Marra’s children among its members.
“The title of the show says it all,” explains Lochhead.
“Some of the pieces go back to when I was writer in residence at Duncan of Jordanstone back in 1980. A lot of the older generation love it, but then we have a lot of fans in their 30s too.
“Just this morning I was sending somebody the words of the recent mucky one I wrote… I like that people are shocked by what we do, but in a nice way.
“It’s a selection of my party pieces.”