Shakespeare for Young People in Contemporary Scottish Theatre: Revisionist Plays by Liz Lochhead and Sharman Macdonald

From the 1970s onwards, Scottish theatre has seen the emergence of women dramatists sharing the intention to confront, challenge and revise the literary Canon. Liz Lochead’s The Magic Island and Sharman MacDonald’s Atfer Juliet, sui-generis rewritings of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet for young readers and spectators, are part of this trend. However, rather than highlighting the critical edge involved in such textual transformations, the essay aims to show how Lochhead and Macdonald live, in their own idiosyncratic ways, what Charles Marowirz defined as “the Shakespearean experience”, reprising and refashioning the Bard’s works in order to meet the expectations of a childlike audience (in The Magic Island), and of a generation of young people torn by unresolved conflicts and inner tensions (in After Juliet). Ultimately, both playwrights allow their audiences, too, to live a full “Shakespearean experience”, thus showing the transhistorical and transcultural hermeneutic potential and adaptability of Shakespeare’s theatre.