Arabic version: ليز هيكلين تحوّل علاقتها العاطفية بتيد هيوز إلى مسرحية

According to The Guardian, Liz Hicklin, 95, will debut her first play at the Melbourne fringe festival in October. Sylvia Plath Stole My Boyfriend draws on Hicklin’s relationship with a young Ted Hughes, whom she met while studying nursing in Cambridge.

Hicklin’s path to staging the production began when she travelled to the Queenscliffe literary festival at 92 after missing an earlier ferry. There she reconnected with ABC radio presenter Jacinta Parsons, whom she had briefly met at Clunes booktown festival. Parsons later became Hicklin’s manager and is a co-director of the play.

Hicklin and Hughes read poetry in local pubs and exchanged letters when they were apart. She later travelled to Canada and Australia, while their correspondence continued. The letters eventually stopped, and Hicklin learned from Hughes’s mother, after sending a Christmas card from Melbourne, that he had married Plath.

The 50-minute production has an upbeat gameshow theme. Pete Smith, the former Sale of the Century host, provides a voiceover as Hicklin’s inner critic, while co-director Sarah Sutherland plays Plath as a gift-shop showgirl. The work also includes other periods of Hicklin’s life, including raising a family in Melbourne, and considers whether life can ever be fully understood even with age and experience.

Hicklin retained Hughes’s letters and postcards, as well as two unpublished poems, before selling the originals to the British Library. Parsons has taken time off from the ABC to work on a documentary that uses Hicklin’s story within a broader look at ageing. Her visits to places connected with Hicklin and Hughes have revived Hicklin’s memories of their time in Yorkshire.