Border lines

Like Summerhall and the Forest Fringe, St Stephen's has become a byword for community and creativity at the Fringe. Run by Newcastle's acclaimed Northern Stage for the second consecutive festival, it's a disarmingly welcoming environment showcasing stellar theatre talents, including Fringe First winners Chris Thorpe and The Paper Birds, as well as playwright Alistair McDowall's well-received Captain Amazing.

The Bloody Great Border Ballad Project—the brainchild of its new Artistic Director, Lorne Campbell—distils this alluring ambience into an evening of poetry, politics and popular music, complete with a house band. It's a surprisingly heart-warming spectacle that riffs on the ballad as a lyrical form, using it to start a dialogue between English and Scottish voices in the midst of the independence debate.

"I was up at St Stephen's last year with Gary Kitching's Me and Mr C," explains Campbell, founder of Scottish theatre company Greyscale and a former Traverse Theatre associate director. "The feeling in the building was amazing: the sense of community among the artists, the connection with a local audience outside the current centre of George IV Bridge. But I was very aware that there were few Scottish artists involved in that conversation. So when I started at Northern Stage, I was very interested in trying to find a way that we could properly invite the Scottish artistic and theatrical community into St Stephen's."

This led him to the border ballad, a form that has strong roots in both the lowlands of Scotland and Northumbria. The ballads performed at St Stephen's this August will offer a range of interpretations. "It's really up for grabs," Campbell explains. "[A ballad] can mean an epic poem. It can mean a real piece of oral tradition, minstrelsy and song. But it also can definitely mean Whitney Houston, Tom Waits or Take That. It's popular song, and all that entails."

For the first part of the evening, two of six "resident balladeers" will perform their take on the form. Over the first two nights, it's Cora Bissett, director of Roadkill, who performs a song from her recent National Theatre of Scotland hit, Glasgow Girls; and Chris Thorpe, who delivers a dystopian vision of an England-Scotland border 20 years in the future in traditional rhyming couplets.

"It's a challenge as a writer not to get a syllable out of place," says Thorpe, whose show There Has Possibly Been An Incident is on at St Stephen's. "I could have done something more abstract, or something like Cora, whose piece is much more personal and passionate. But I think the way that the guest balladeers are interpreting the theme have one thing in common: they're true to the spirit of the ballad as a public, poetic and musical forum for analysing society, for telling stories, for spreading an idea."

The remaining four balladeers, who will appear throughout the month in various combinations, include Lucy Ellinson, star of the Traverse's acclaimed Grounded; Third Angel's Alex Kelly; Daniel Bye, who's performing and directing How to Occupy an Oil Rig also at St Stephen's; and emerging Scottish theatre-maker Kieran Hurley.

But the show's grand finale is the formation of an epic ballad, written over course of the The Bloody Great Border Ballad Project's run. Campbell explains: "The ballad begins with a foundling babe being discovered floating on the River Tweed in a Moses basket on the night of the dissolution of the Act of Union, at the beginning of an imagined no-longer-United Kingdom. And then each night there'll be a new guest artist who will contribute the next verse of that poem and they'll be responsible for the next five years of the narrative. Over the 19 nights of the Fringe, we'll go 95 years into an imagined history of this child but also of Scotland and England as separate entities."

"As a Scotsman living in England," he adds, "I feel strangely removed from the independence debate. I won't have a vote, which feels weird. And that's why I'm very precisely not talking about Scottish independence. I'm talking about the end of the union and what that means from both sides."

The tune, first verse and refrain for the show's grand epic ballad were written by musician Aly Macrae, and its early contributors include writers Alan McKendrick and Molly Naylor, as well as actor Tam Dean Burn. The new verses are recorded each night too, so people can see how it's progressing without having to attend every show.

And though the format occasionally borders on cheesy, this is precisely what the director intends. "A ballad can survive many things but it can't survive irony," Campbell insists. "It has to say 'I claim this.' Teenagers with broken hearts use ballads, political song-makers use ballads. It goes to identity in a very honest and emotional way, which feels enormously timely. I think we're in an aesthetic, political and theatrical moment where we can't really fuck around with irony anymore. We've got to say 'this is what we think', 'this is what we want to say.'"

The audience, Campbell says, "are the folk of the folk tale." And they get involved too, singing along with Macrae's soulful but catchy refrain and being invited to leave a song for the next night's audience to sing.

"We get together in the room," says Thorpe, "we talk and we sing about stuff. That continuity from night to night, it's just a beautiful touch. It's the passing down of an idea - in this case over the span of a few weeks, but it's what humans have always done."