Rushen Players

Good Things

by Liz Lochhead

NOVEMBER 2026
Thursday 19h to Saturday 21st : Curtain 7:30pm
Erin Arts Centre, Port Erin
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These notes are to provide a little more background information to the play
than we are able to fit in the paper programme

Director’s Notes

Welcome to the Rushen Players’ production of Good Things

The Playwright:

Liz Lochhead, born in 1947, is a Scottish poet, playwright and broadcaster.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh,
she was the Makar (National Poet of Scotland) 2011-16
and Poet Laureate for Glasgow 2005-11.

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.

The Play:

Good Things, first performed in 2004, is a romantic farce set in a charity shop.
Suddenly single and with the dreaded ‘Big Five-0’ staring her in the face,
Susan Love – a charity shop volunteer – also has to cope with a father in
his second childhood, a daughter in the throes of aggravated adolescence
and an ex who, unfortunately, still has the power to wound.

Set in the charity shop on three different days in one year – 6^th January,
Valentine’s Day and Christmas Eve – Good Things is a poignant, hilarious and
sympathetic play with a lot to say about finding love later in life
while still retaining humour, sanity and dignity.

Reviews:

Sarah Crown, interviewing her for The Guardian in 2016, writes:

‘Liz Lochhead is one of nature’s talkers, asking as many questions as she answers,
and her anecdotes are thick with mentions of friends: good friends;
dear friends; oldest, closest, best....

Lochhead’s voice, as in her writing, is rich and sensitive, frank and cheerfully vernacular.
And the themes are there, too: nationality; female experience;
a profound awareness of time, how we move through it, and how it moves through us.’

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