Fringe: The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart
Playfair Library - 05/08/22
Anarchic, amazing and entertaining, but what would Hamish have said?
A fine, very Scottish start to Edinburgh’s Festival. Set in the academic grandeur of the Playfair Library, laid out with tables, cabaret-style, the audience were encouraged, indeed obliged, to play a role in the entertainment. From tearing up paper napkins to make artificial snow, to being playfully caressed by the performers, singing various choruses, having their tables used as temporary daises, or commandeered as part of the action, like our table companion who became momentarily to his surprise the front of Colin Syme’s motorbike, there was no danger of losing the audience’s attention. Though it has to be said, the audience involvement remained passive – they were entertained, certainly stimulated and challenged, but not invited to actively participate. This may be why some uneasy questions remained, as you will see.
In the meantime we were well entertained by Charlene Boyd as Prudencia, the earnest young researcher from the School of Scottish Studies intent on collecting traditional ballads, Ewan Black effortlessly convincing as Colin Syme, the virile motorcycling professor, Gavin Jon Wright, variously as Professor Macintosh from Aberdeen University and later very effectively as a threatening but eventually heartrendingly sad Devil, Natali McCleary as the PhD student and Alasdair Macrae who led the musical proceedings. All the performers were excellent, equally in command of acting, singing and movement.
So why invoke Hamish? Otherwise, Hamish Henderson, founder of the School of Scottish Studies and the father of traditional music in Scotland. It was a question I asked David Greig, author of ‘Prudencia Hart’ as we left the play last night. His diplomatic answer of “I don’t know” reflects our own response. As someone who knows Hamish’s work, I’m not sure I know either. He would have liked the idea that a play dealing with the question of folk music culture has been one of the most successful plays of the National Theatre of Scotland in the last 10 years, and the fact that over the years it has often been performed in pubs rather than theatres (although ‘Sandy Bells’, Hamish’s local pub, was too small for a performance). He would have enjoyed the intermingling of music and words, and in particular he would have loved the use of traditional music, such as ‘Blackwater Side’, soulfully sung by Natali McCleary. But would he have liked the treatment of traditional music? or the scholarship of folklore which was traduced in the shape of the central figure of Prudencia Hart, the young scholar who is brutally treated in the play? Yes, I know Prudencia has the last laugh in undoing the works of the devil and her tormentors in the last Act, by giving the answer that love and the poetry of the ballads are more powerful than the Devil. However before that she is brutally treated in text and physically in ways that at times made me wonder whether the play would be written in this way today, since the critique of the “Me Too” movement. Also the rough treatment of folk culture in the text, whilst often clever i.e. “Scottish culture is less ‘Tam Lin’ (a great traditional ballad) than Subo (a term for Susan Boyle)” or the despairing cry of Prudencia trapped in her library Hell, “Fuck Folk!” I’m not sure Hamish would have liked it!
Meantime, can we wish a redeemed Prudencia a successful career, as presaged in the new ‘portrait’ which mysteriously found its way into the gallery of Edinburgh academics on the stair of the Playfair Library?
Cover photo: Ryan Buchanan
