The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart theatre review.

The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart is a delightful, original work that weaves Scottish folk songs with a surreal story of love, hell and our tendency to overanalyse art and life.  The all-singing, all-acting, instrument-playing cast of five bring the songs and story to life in a real bar, and use the entire space, even if it means climbing over audience members.  With a fully stocked bar available, and complimentary whisky it is an all-sensory experience.  Furthermore, I am a sucker for things that rhyme.  This play rhymes a lot of the time.

The story revolves around Scottish folk ballads, and Act I takes some fun twists and turns, employing light comedy and ghost story techniques to reach the point when it appears that our heroine has found herself living out her own Scottish folk ballad.  Act II starts out in a drastically different style, which I found somewhat jarring.  This change in tone, though, is somewhat accounted for and eventually justified.  When it comes out this new style, though, rather than restoring the tone set in Act I the play morphs into a heightened version of its former self, and later morphs again into yet another cartoonish style.  I struggled with the theatrical style taking so many different forms, but thankfully the story and our heroine's plight remained absorbing enough to carry the awkward transitions.

The story is a truly fascinating and satisfying one.  Although it has surprising developments and kept me guessing on some points, I felt it was quite clearly moving toward Prudencia's discovery of her own ballad and I looked forward to hearing the song she would sing and how she would tell her tale.  When the story has finally resolved and Prudencia takes the stage with microphone in hand to sing to us I was prepared to be wowed.  I was thus completely bewildered when her song of choice proved to be a chart-topping pop song from the new millennium, one that in no way resembles a Scottish ballad of yore.  This decision was not totally at odds with the story but it further illustrates the muddy inconsistency of the tone the play wished to set.  It was a strange undoing to a long anticipated dramatic moment.

Overall, I enjoyed this show immensely.  On a detail-oriented level, I struggled to reconcile all of the changes in tone that the story-telling goes through.

See this play if you want to immerse yourself in another world and like combining various forms of entertainment in one package.