At 95, Liz Hicklin is debuting a play about her romantic relationship with the young Ted Hughes, whom she later learned had married Sylvia Plath. The production, Sylvia Plath Stole My Boyfriend, explores lost love, ageing and Hicklin’s enduring feelings about Hughes, while marking a remarkable late-career creative revival.

Hicklin met Hughes while studying nursing in Cambridge, and the pair exchanged poetry and passionate letters before she travelled to Canada and Australia. Their correspondence eventually ended, and after receiving a letter from Hughes’s mother revealing his marriage to Plath, Hicklin was devastated; she later saw Hughes once more after Plath’s 1963 suicide and preserved his letters, postcards and two unpublished poems.