Spoken word review: Liz Lochhead: Making Nothing Happen, Assembly Rooms (Venue 20), Edinburgh

By SUSAN MANSFIELD
Published on 07/08/2012 11:59

POET Liz Lochhead is a natural performer and, with her appointment last year as Scotland’s Makar, out national poet, it feels appropriate for her to step beyond the confines of the Book Festival and take her place on the Fringe.

Liz Lochhead: Making Nothing Happen

Assembly Rooms 
(Venue 20)

Rating: ***

The show is a light-hearted retrospective of 40 years of writing. Lochhead’s first collection, Memo for Spring, was published in 1972, and a surprising number of the poems in this reading come from her early work. Are poets like rock stars, she muses aloud: do they do their best work when young?

A chance to do a poetry cabaret show on the Fringe in the 1970s with actress and poet Marcella Evaristi prompted Lochhead to write a series of monologues. They are natural performance pieces, still fresh and entertaining, and led to her starting to work as a playwright.

Many will recognise her “greatest hits” in this show, peppered with a few newer pieces. No great risks are taken; the work is accessible, frequently funny, but almost never really personal. It was Auden who wrote that poetry “makes nothing happen”. Not a great deal happens in this hour, but at times that is a comfortable enough place to be.

• Until 26 August. Today 1:15pm.