Sue Glover was born in Edinburgh and lives in North-East Fife, writing for television and radio as well as the theatre. Unlike many successful late twentieth-century plays, often by Glasgow-born writers, Glover’s work concentrates not on the city but on country life, sometimes in remote settings: St Kilda in The Straw Chair (1988); the Borders in Bondagers (1991); Shetland in Shetland Saga (2000). Political and economic pressures — such as the exploitation of labour in the nineteenth century examined in Bondagers, or merciless, global capitalism at the end of the twentieth in Shetland Saga — are felt just as acutely in these remote contexts, inexorably determining the daily struggles of characters’ lives.
These lives, however, are shown as still more significantly shaped by the politics of gender. Glover follows playwrights such as Liz Lochhead and Rona Munro in the extent of her concentration on women’s experience — most obiously through the all-female cast of Bondagers, but also in the other plays named, and in The Seal Wife (1980) and Sacred Hearts (1994). These plays show women doubly oppressed — by difficult conditions of life and labour generally, but specifically by the social construction of their roles as wives or lovers, and often by lurking male uneasiness about their sexuality.
Bondagers examines a range of these conventional roles, and suggests some hope of changing or escaping them in Liza’s rejection of marriage and child-bearing as women’s inevitable destiny. Glover’s regular use of folk-song and ballad leaves phrases such as ‘woo’d and married and a” resonating disturbingly throughout the play, but its staging is consistently affirmative, too: dance, song, and even the collective movements of farm labour suggest a choric solidarity among the women, determined to help each other through harsh conditions. Throughout the action, too, there are hints of altogether different possibilities offered by a new life in Canada, along with characters’ eerie prescience of inhabiting a rural world itself on the edge of radical change.