theartsdesk Q&A: Playwright David Greig

Leading light of the Scottish playwriting boom on revisiting Macbeth

by Hilary WhitneySaturday, 06 February 2010

David Greig: 'It's fun being rude about your own country in public.'K Ribbe

A new play by David Greig opens at the Hampstead Theatre for the Royal Shakespeare Company next week. A theatre director as well as playwright, Greig (b. 1969) is one of the most prolific and artistically ambitious playwrights of his generation and a key figure in the current burgeoning of Scottish theatre. In addition to an extraordinarily diverse range of plays such as Europe (Traverse Theatre, 1994), The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union (Tron Theatre, 1999) and Damascus (Edinburgh International Festival, 2009), his work includes adaptations such as his version of Euripides’ The Bacchae, starring Alan Cumming (National Theatre of Scotland, 2007), translations and plays for young people.

We made it very clear that we were looking out to Europe from Scotland and that we weren’t interested in London

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