Liz Lochhead: Making Nothing Happen

It's by no means an insult to suggest that Scotland's makar, Liz Lochhead, doesn't deliver the most controversial, raucous or highly-charged hour on the Fringe. A prolific and popular poet since the early 70s, Lochhead's show at the Assembly Rooms (where, as it happens, she made her Fringe debut) has a lot of ground to cover and, while she is still producing reams of great work, it's older poems and monologues which make up the bulk of this afternoon's performance. So there's an inevitable air of nostalgia. But Making Nothing Happen—a line taken from Auden's poem 'In Memory of WB Yeats'—is a little misleading. Much less the "ranches of isolation" and "busy griefs" of Auden's lament, this hour with Lochhead fizzles with wit, warmth, and the well-honed sense of drama that have made publishers, directors, educators and even First Ministers pick up the phone to the North Lanarkshire native.

Indeed, there's plenty of what Lochhead terms "first the phonecall" poems – those poems written on commission or for a purpose. They're great selections, showcasing Lochhead's technical dexterity and manipulation of muliple dialects, but also her ability to get inside the heads of others—be it the school kid, the bad kid or the struggling adult—and voice their motives and misapprehensions with respectful believability.

Clearly, these are performances Lochhead has sharpened over years of readings, and they benefit from her practised ability to let their playfulness sing. In short, here's a show which finds Lochhead living energetically by her credo: "just tell the story, make it make sense."