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“Were this show to be bottled as fine distilled whiskey, it would be labeled 95 proof and altogether intoxicating,” said Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times. Staged in a theater that’s been convincingly disguised as a pub in the Scottish Borders, this National Theatre of Scotland production is “pure, unadulterated magic.” The title character, a musicologist who’s writing a dissertation about “The Topography of Hell in Scottish Ballads,” is played by Melody Grove with “such easy charisma” that “you are with her from first step to last.” Her character’s chosen subject may sound abstruse, but when she eventually leaves the pub, ventures out into a snowstorm, and is seduced by an ominous figure (David McKay), Satan’s netherworld becomes a little too real.
To be sure, playwright David Greig has constructed a “culturally complex” story, said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. Yet the freewheeling performers understand full well that audience members “don’t necessarily want to spend their precious night off sitting in some posh theater being educated on the history of ancient Scottish drarm-ah.” What they get instead is “a ripe, lively yarn” delivered in rhyming couplets and accompanied by fiddle, bagpipe, and bodhran (not to mention occasional servings of single-malt scotch). Academics everywhere take a skewering, but the show is less interested in making enemies than in reminding us that folk music is “first and foremost a celebration of life and death, with plenty of booze and sexuality thrown in.”