In the auld Scottish ballad “Tam Lin,” the title character is a knight in a terrible spot. He’s been captured by the fairies and expects to be sacrificed this very Halloween, when their queen pays her tithe to hell. Luckily, he’s won the love of Janet, the bold girl from the castle down the road. She pulls Tam Lin from his horse as he rides in procession to his doom. The fairy queen (“an angry queen was she”) turns him into a snake, a bear, a lion, red-hot iron, and (depending on what version you read) molten lead, but Janet holds on to her man through it all, and he’s finally returned to human form—naked and free from the fairies’ thrall, if not Janet’s.
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Greig’s Prudencia is the sort who’d not only be familiar with “Tam Lin” but with every one of its many medieval iterations. She’s a scholar specializing in the ballads of the Scottish Borders region, where proximity to England meant centuries of war, plunder, and song. Her PhD thesis, she says, was about the “topography of hell”—a place so often visited in Borders lore that it can apparently be surveyed and mapped based on the textual evidence.
Chief among the barbarians, as far as Prudencia is concerned, is Colin Syme, the working-class performativity man. A jovial creep with a motorcycle, a Hawaiian shirt, and the sensibilities of the habitual conventioneer, Colin comes right out and tells Prudencia that modern scholarship is a game. Then he calls her a “librarian” for refusing to join in.
Melody Grove looks like Cillian Murphy’s attractive sister and gives Prudencia a passion that takes on admixtures of sternness or pain or love as the narrative unfolds. The others assume multiple roles and perform on multiple musical instruments, though Andy Clark is mainly an energetically obnoxious Colin and David McKay mainly a quietly unnerving Satan. Macrae and Annie Grace do characters, as well, but concentrate for the most part on the songs, of which there are many. At one point Grace sings, uncannily, in the manner of Sandy Denny, whose voice introduced me to “Tam Lin” decades ago. It was a haunting moment for me; I suspect it would be the same for anybody, whether they’d heard Denny sing or not.
Through 10/14: Tue-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E. Grand, 312-595-5600, chicagoshakes.com, $45-$60.
