Adelaide Festival. The German Club. 1 Mar 2013
As audience members pick places at the tables in the German Club's upstairs bar, the cast of The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart take breaks from singing Celtic songs to meander around issuing greetings and requesting that the white table napkins be torn up to replicate snow in Kelso, the setting of their National Theatre of Scotland's play.
"We'll tell you when to throw it."
And thus strangers at tables bond with a common task, pondering the usher's warnings that the performance will be "all around you - don't sit in the centre if you would rather just observe".
As it turns out, it is low-risk audience involvement and everyone joins in merrily, singing and applauding on instruction.
The action begins as an easy segue from the musical performance and into a narrative in rhyming couplets. And there is red-stockinged Prudencia, a rather fraught academic specialising in Celtic folk tradition. Portrayed by Melody Grove of most melodic voice, Prudencia is heading down to the Borders from Edinburgh for a conference on "The Borders Ballad: Neither Border Nor Ballad".
Cue snow.
Prudencia shoulder-rides through the room showered in shreds of napkin. It's a wonderful sight and the audience is happily immersed and quickly protecting drinks from falling tissue.
Sitting Prudencia upon the bar, cast members use their bodies and a torch to build a car around her, the fiddler using his bow as windscreen wiper, another actor keeping the snow falling from aloft. It's a triumph.
The conference scene, delivered by actors dispersed around the room, is wicked spoof on the pretensions of academia and the posturing tedium of conferences. Wit whips out of the couplets: "My idea of hell a middle-aged man singing a capella".
Contemporary idiom is thrown - Facebook and Twitter.
The actors leap on stools and tables, sit on laps, stroll the room and perch amid the audience as they deliver the ever-stranger tale which shadows Robbie Burn's Tam O'Shanter.
With Kelso snowed in, Prudencia reluctantly agrees to go to a B&B with Colin Syme, a fairly gross and ebullient character who has a PhD in football chants. They take refuge in a pub where it is karaoke night. Albeit that Scots folklore says this is the Devil's midwinter night when hell may open up, Prudencia eschews karaoke hell and sets off alone in the snow-in to find the B&B. A Scots housewife, one Annie Grace aloft on a wine barrel and singing like an angel, invites Prudencia to stay with her, eat chips , watch TV, look at baby photos... It's a haunting moment. Such is the heaven or hell of Scottish council house life. Prudencia declines and finds her own heaven and hell in the B&B - endless books and millennia with the Lucifer. Stockholm syndrome ensues and the play, having fallen into prose, falls out of focus. Hell is, indeed, long. Prudencia's sexual awakening is a less interesting journey.
The cast recaptures its audience's spirit with a rousing ending in which no-longer fusty Prudencia, saved by heroic lowbrow Colin, can see the light at last - and you'll never guess whence it comes.
Written by David Grieg and co-created by director Wils Wilson, this work of Scots folkloric imaginings fits the formula for Festival fare. It is safely anarchical, laced with historic and cultural references, sprinkled with humour, alive with music, rich in good performance and presented in an unusual venue.
Samela Harris
When: 1 to 9 Mar
Where: The German Club
Bookings: bass.net.au
