Skip to main content

The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart Review

Tron Theatre, Glasgow
5 stars
The National Theatre of Scotland’s ongoing adventures in popular
culture have impressed thus far by avoiding any sense of artistic
tourism. This latest foray into ad hoc informality finds writer David
Greig and director Wils Wilson going deep into the heart of folk ballad
country to make something which is by turns one of the most
rambunctiously life-affirming and touchingly beautiful reinventions of
its subject.

Designed to be played in spit and sawdust pub function rooms, and
performed here by five actor/musicians in the Tron’s already
atmospheric Victorian Bar, we’re introduced to the shy young folk song
collector of the play’s title who, inbetween doing a PhD on the
topography of Hell, is dispatched to Kelso in 2010’s bleak mid-winter
to deliver an academic paper. Stranded in the snow made here of torn-up
napkins and tinkled wine glasses, Prudencia finds herself caught in the
hurly-burly of supernatural excesses that resemble the musical yarns
she so lovingly tends to.

Greig is fast becoming a master of appropriating old forms for
twenty-first century times, and here he even manages to slip a Karl
Denver tune inbetween Alasdair Macrae’s score as well as his own
waggishly realised rhyming couplets. Yet, by the erotically charged
second half, the tempo of the piece has slowed drastically to something
more intimate, and, as Madeleine Worrall’s Prudencia courts David McKay
and Andy Clark’s lost and lonely devil, downright heart-breaking. When
Prudencia finally takes the floor with a genuine pop classic reinvented
first as haunting lament before morphing into kick-ass hoedown and back
to karaoke stalwart, as with her own getting of wisdom, you shouldn’t
miss this show for the world.

The Herald, February 14th 2011

ends

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds

Big Gold Dreams – A Story of Scottish Independent Music 1977-1989

Disc 1 1. THE REZILLOS (My Baby Does) Good Sculptures (12/77)  2. THE EXILE Hooked On You (8/77) 3. DRIVE Jerkin’ (8/77) 4. VALVES Robot Love (9/77) 5. P.V.C. 2 Put You In The Picture (10/77) 6. JOHNNY & THE SELF ABUSERS Dead Vandals (11/77) 7. BEE BEE CEE You Gotta Know Girl (11/77) 8. SUBS Gimme Your Heart (2/78) 9. SKIDS Reasons (No Bad NB 1, 4/78) 10. FINGERPRINTZ Dancing With Myself (1/79)  11. THE ZIPS Take Me Down (4/79) 12. ANOTHER PRETTY FACE All The Boys Love Carrie (5/79)  13. VISITORS Electric Heat (5/79) 14. JOLT See Saw (6/79) 15. SIMPLE MINDS Chelsea Girl (6/79) 16. SHAKE Culture Shock (7/79) 17. HEADBOYS The Shape Of Things To Come (7/79) 18. FIRE EXIT Time Wall (8/79) 19. FREEZE Paranoia (9/79) 20. FAKES Sylvia Clarke (9/79) 21. TPI She’s Too Clever For Me (10/79) 22. FUN 4 Singing In The Showers (11/79) 23. FLOWERS Confessions (12/79) 24. TV21 Playing With Fire (4/80) 25. ALEX FERGUSSON Stay With Me Tonight (1980) 1. THE REZILL