The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart

The first thing you notice about The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart—one of the most wonderful, uplifting plays in David Greig's bulging canon—is its lively, festive atmosphere. The audience are seated cabaret-style as the actors weave between tables, chatting to punters and making them feel at home. With live traditional folk music (performed with gusto by the cast) playing you in, it's not long before your toes are tapping and you're chatting to your neighbours like you've known them for years.

Then, the invisible curtain goes up and this inventive, absorbing tale starts to unfold. Prudencia Hart, an earnest Edinburgh academic, makes her way to a conference on Border Ballads on a snowy winter's night and finds herself embroiled in her own ballad-like tale of romance, heroism and supernatural goings-on. Set in the present day but told in the style of a traditional ballad (primarily in rhyming couplets), the format may sound jarring but the two worlds meld together effortlessly, creating an atmosphere that's effervescent with merriment and mischief.

Wils Wilson's slick direction spreads the performance across the spacious upper floor of the atmospheric Ghillie Dhu, so the action happens all around the audience. Her creative staging and the ensemble cast's larger-than-life acting make this a blissful theatrical experience, even though the momentum slows down a touch after the interval. But Greig's writing impresses most – he coaxes pithy jokes and well-observed details into what seems, on the surface, a fairly restrictive metrical pattern. Fusing a reverence for balladry with an inherent recognition of the absurdities of the form, Greig skilfully brings together Prudencia Hart's transcendental narrative and, together with Wilson and the cast, creates a heart-stopping musical finale.