Iain Heggie and Ostrovsky

Iain Heggie's just popped round for lunch, in London for a break from his writer's residency at RSAMD in Glasgow. He's working on a new series of adaptations / translations of Ostrovsky, about to put four such plays into production, two of them never translated before.
The whole gig also serves as a workshop, priming these plays for some national production. According to Iain, Ostrovsky is the closest writer there is to Shakespeare - while Tolstoy could abide neither Shakespeare nor Chekhov, he loved Ostrovsky. Iain's giving us some of the rhythms of the Scottish voice without using Scots language per se, breaking up lines and fashioning new ways of making actors deliver Ostrovsky's long sentences in a spontaneous way. Sounds like a good bet for the RSC as they seek to break from the purely Shakespearean diet. I love Iain's work for its intelligence, its wit, its briskness and the sheer fun of the language, its earthy love-bound heroes and heroines, its humanity.