Marcella Evaristi has played a major part in the "New Wave" of Scottish drama that began in the 1980s. Although concerned with contemporary issues, her plays tend to focus on personal psychology rather than on the overtly political. Even when politics has a direct impact on her characters, it is the effect rather than the cause that interests her. She draws heavily on her own experiences in creating her plays, using powers of observation heightened by a sardonic wit and tempered by a wistful empathy. Yet, she adopts the position of detached narrator of the incidents she relates. In her 1989 essay, "I hope you don't think I'm being too personal," she writes: "Distancing factors had to come into operation so that the truth of the world experienced could breathe and not be suffocated with autobiography, with literal facts."

"Distancing factors" that pervade Evaristi's work are, first, an unfailingly...