The National Theatre of Scotland has no fixed playhouse of its own. The peripatetic troupe usually plays in pubs and other social venues, and it’s been successful at the Edinburgh Festival. So it’s natural that Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s Global Theatre Exchange would bring it, along with the Black Watch that scored a previous CST hit, to its Upstairs space converted to a pub.
A well-stocked bar with its busy tenders beckon. Five actor-musicians at the front playing strings and tooting with vigor before tables to be shared set the play to come.
Drinking can begin with a free shot of single-malt scotch, but more liquid can be ordered with it...or just about any time later when the actress playing Prudencia Hart isn’t standing on the bar. (At intermission drinks can be downed with -- or without -- freely offered cucumber thingees and little cheese-wiches.)
Prudencia is a professor who specializes in Scottish border ballads. (Attractive Melody Grove plays her earnestly but looks and moves more like an advanced graduate student.) While she’s researching for the topography of hell in a missing book, she meets up with the devil. He possesses the ballad of undoing and wants to possess her. Not just soul-ly.
Aha! The play is revealed as scoring modern pedants with their postmodern theories. Prudencia’s trials remind us that border ballads are stories about ghostly and underworld creatures and not without a bit of the bawdy. Of course, they’re also poetic, so the script uses a lot of rhyming couplets and Celtic lilt.
Unfortunately, there’s too much of good things like story-telling suspense. The devil has a hell of a time with Prudencia way into years of the future. And years. And years. Then she’s leaving and staying. And repeat. Repeat.
Just as at the beginning of the play, which is overloaded with railing against the Ossian poems and such attempts at satire as building a ballad via karaoke, repetition and stretching out simple ideas become, and finally are, tiresome. Is the show really only 2-1/2 hours?
The devil made me like him here. More than Prudencia. More than her earthly motorcyclist suitor Colin. More than the play. Maybe it’s because his accent was never difficult to understand and his music loud enough without making lyrics indecipherable.
