At 95, Liz Hicklin Turns Her Ted Hughes Romance Into a Play

Liz Hicklin is 95 years old, and this October she will debut her first play at the Melbourne fringe festival. Its title is Sylvia Plath Stole My Boyfriend, and it draws on her romantic relationship with a young Ted Hughes.

The Yorkshire poet had a "magic touch", Hicklin recalls — one felt by many women. "It was like I was blossoming," she says of their time together.

How did a missed ferry change her life?

The story behind the play begins with a ferry Hicklin nearly did not board. Torrential rain had made the drive to the Sorrento terminal perilous. She missed her ferry.

Sitting in the car park, watching the boat glide off, the 92-year-old chastised herself: Go home. Don't be ridiculous. You're 92.

She got on the next ferry. That decision, she now recognises, was a sliding doors moment — the turn that set her on the path from private memories to public stage.

Why is a 95-year-old writing about Ted Hughes?

Hicklin's answer is disarmingly blunt: "I really should be knitting."

Instead, she has written a first play about the years when she and a young Hughes were romantically involved — years before the poet's marriage to Sylvia Plath fixed his place in literary history. Her play's title stakes a personal claim on that story.

Hicklin remembers Hughes as a poet whose "magic touch" affected many women, not only her. Her own account is one of transformation: "It was like I was blossoming."

What can audiences expect in Melbourne?

Sylvia Plath Stole My Boyfriend runs at the Melbourne fringe festival this October. It marks Hicklin's debut as a playwright, arriving more than seven decades after the romance it depicts.

The production adds a living, first-hand female voice to the crowded field of Hughes–Plath retellings — one that speaks, at 95, not from archives but from memory.