Like his compatriots Tom McGrath and Liz Lochhead, Stewart Conn is a significant poet as well as a prominent playwright, practicing both arts with equal fluency. In McGrath's and Lochhead's cases, however, dramatic writing developed after they already had established careers as poets. Conn, by contrast, demonstrated high skill in both arts from his first prominence in the 1960s. In private discussion with this author, he has talked of how he "hears the voices" and finds himself compelled to give them poetic or dramatic expression. Conn demonstrates in his dramatic craft a quality of profound theatricality. This theatricality arises from the linguistic and cultural milieus out of which he writes: his poetry is usually in standard English, while his plays make use of both Scots and English dialogue and draw further on a public social context and linguistic register in a perhaps more representational way than his poetry...