ABSTRACT
In The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart (2011), the eponymous heroine is a collector of ballads who views her role as the loving preservation of traditional artworks. However, as David Greig’s drama develops, Prudencia is forced to revise her sense of the ballad’s nature and potentials. This chapter highlights the ways in which the play’s re-performed (and transformed) ballads become a catalyst for live, collective vocalisation, drawing on notions of ‘musicking’ (Christopher Small) and ‘presencing’ (James Porter, Mairi McFadyen). Taking Greig’s evocation of an imaginatively transformative ‘rough theatre’ as stimulus, and informed by a new focus within ballad studies on the ways in which performers and audiences produce meaning together, the chapter also reflects upon the value of the traditional ballad for politically engaged theatre, utilising Jill Dolan’s descriptions of a ‘utopian performative’ to consider how and why contemporary theatre artists might choose to borrow from of the sociable, participatory dynamics of the ceilidh. It concludes that Greig’s playful, ballad-fuelled dramaturgy not only offers a stomping evening’s entertainment, but can also be located within a wider project of promoting a lively, popular and multi-vocal debate concerning Scottish identity and destiny, in the context of the 2014 independence referendum.
