Ballad Lines review
New female-led musical inspired by Appalachian folk tunes is full of tangy flavour
There are some soaringly impassioned performances in this new musical, but it’s the songs that are the star. Woven around traditional Appalachian folk tunes and accompanied by a live band dominated by lyrical fiddle, they are lilting, haunting and oozing with gorgeous harmonies.
The resonant ballads that inspired the score originated in Scotland and Ireland and travelled to the US with waves of transatlantic immigrants. Composer-lyricist Finn Anderson and director Tania Azevedo, who are also co-writers of the show’s book, trace a modern 30-something West Virginian woman’s ancestry with numbers that transport us back and forth through time. First produced at the Macrobert Arts Centre in Stirling, it’s a quirky, charming piece, although the narrative sometimes lacks drive. Azevedo’s production is swirled through with a stirring melancholy, and staged with style and fluidity.
Sarah (Frances McNamee) has just moved into a New York apartment with her girlfriend, Alix (Sydney Sainté), an ambitious architect. Their lives seem perfect and the future almost too shiny with promise – but in a battered cardboard box lies a family history that will blow their plans apart. Sarah’s formidable aunt Betty (Rebecca Trehearn), who raised Sarah and her brother, has died, leaving behind a trove of cassette recordings in which she relates the odyssey of two of their female forebears: spirited 15-year-old Jean (Yna Tresvalles), eager to get out of Ulster and chase adventure in America; and, a century earlier in Scotland, music-loving minister’s wife Cait (Kirsty Findlay).
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Jean and Cait are plunged into contrasting kinds of turmoil when both discover that they are pregnant – and listening to their stories prompts Sarah, who has never wanted children, to reconsider and ponder what her own legacy might be. It’s a dilemma that ruptures her and Alix’s devoted relationship.
TK Hay’s set is subtly rich in texture, its rope, calico and wood giving it a homespun air; there’s a hemp-like backdrop of silhouetted mountains or a ragged coastline, and the skeletal timber shape of a boat hangs overhead. Tinovimbanashe Sibanda’s choreography is pulse-quickeningly vital, crammed with percussive gestures – foot stamping, chest thumping, hand clapping. And the singing is glorious, with a bell-like clarity and lovely minor-key intensity.
The problem is that – despite a unifying theme of female agency and social and bodily autonomy – Sarah’s narrative strand feels slightly flimsy compared to the precarious existence of the women who came before her. McNamee sometimes seems a little stranded, a bystander floating at the verge of more interesting tales, and the piece sometimes bobs too long among the eddies and whorls of the multi-stream storytelling. Still, its unusual salty tang and pungent music lend it character and compulsion. It’s an affecting and elegant chamber piece.
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