A dark and wickedly funny farce about one man's twisted attempts to find a woman he can control completely. Adapted from Moliere's classic comedy The School for Wives by Liz Lochhead, 'Scotland's greatest living dramatist' (Scotland on Sunday).

He's old, rich and determined to find the perfect wife. She's young, innocent and in debt to him. He'll have her by any means possible...

'Wives like your one, those with all the smarts,
The ballbreakers, they're the ones to break our hearts...
So pick a simple girl - it's not rocket science!'

Liz Lochhead's play Educating Agnes was first staged by Theatre Babel at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, in 2008.

About the Author
Liz Lochhead is a poet, playwright, performer and broadcaster. Her original stage plays include Thon Man Moliere, Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, Blood and Ice, Good Things and Perfect Days. Her many stage adaptations include Dracula, Moliere's Tartuffe, Miseryguts (based on Le Misanthrope) and Educating Agnes (based on L'Ecole des Femmes); as well as versions of Medea by Euripides (for which she won the Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2001), and Thebans (adapted mainly from Sophocles' Oedipus and Antigone). Her collections of poetry include Dreaming Frankenstein, The Colour of Black & White, A Choosing (Selected Poems), Fugitive Colours and True Confessions, a collection of monologues and theatre lyrics. She served a five-year term as Scotland's Makar, or National Poet, from 2011 till 2016, and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2015. She won the Sunday Herald Scottish Culture Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017, and the 2023 Saltire Society Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to Scottish literature.

Reviews

'A daft, boisterous, big-hearted comedy that merrily weaves references to Kinsey and Cosmo on to Moliere's 17th-century frame'

* Guardian *

'Lochhead has fashioned a fabulous script, working Moliere's playful rhymes into a robust, clever and hilarious Scots-English... shifts brilliantly between "high" and "low" registers, all the better to draw out the play's comedy of hypocritical sexual manners'

* Telegraph *

'Pure bliss... Lochhead's extraordinary facility for manipulating the meter has never been bettered. She exploits every trick in the book to make the verse sayable but maintain the comic effect'

* The Times *



Book Information
ISBN 9781854595331
Author Liz Lochhead
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint Nick Hern Books
Publisher Nick Hern Books
Weight(grams) 108g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 131mm * 8mm