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book, music and lyrics by Màiri Mason, directed by Alexander Offord

Epona Productions, Toronto Fringe Festival, Factory Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

July 5-14, 2012

“O I forbid you, maidens a',
That wear gowd on your hair,
To come or gae by Carterhaugh,
For young Tam Lin is there.” Child ballad #39A

Tam Lin is an eerie, thoughtful and imaginative new musical based on an ancient Scottish ballad.  The ballad has inspired innumerable prose retellings, but composer and lyricist Màiri Mason rightly recognized how powerful the story could be on stage.  Her version is so successful it makes one wonder why no one has thought of creating a Celtic-infused musical of the tale before.

In Mason’s version, Tam Lin (a strapping Wesley J. Colford) falls from his horse near Carterhaugh in the Scottish Border country and is rescued by the Queen of the Fey (given frightening capriciousness by Amy Marie Wallace), who keeps Tam Lin as her lover and knight.  Meanwhile, Jennet Ross (a plucky Màiri Mason) reaches her eighteenth birthday and thus comes into the inheritance of Carterhaugh as her father’s only child.  Despite the traditional warnings to young virgins never to pass through Carterhaugh forest, Jennet is determined to visit the land that is hers.  When she picks a double rose, Tam appears to her, warns her away, but the two soon fall in love.  The difficulty is not only that Tam is in thrall to the Queen but that she has recently spurned him for another.  This is likely because she perceives the waning of his affections, but Mason does not make the point clear.  In this situation Tam fears that he will be the sacrifice of one of their own that the fairies make every seven years as their tithe to Hell. 

Director Alexander Offord staged the musical as a community ritual initiated with the playing of bagpipes (by Mason) and the creation of a playing area by pouring sand in an oval.  The narration is sometimes sung by seven-member cast, sometimes by The Filidh (an earnest Iain Stewart) or professional poet, to the accompaniment of violin or bodhrán or both.  Choreographer Courtney Simpson has ingeniously incorporated Highland-influences dancing into the story-telling.  While Offord has the action play out at a stately pace, he should also try to generate a greater sense of mounting tension as the situation for Tam and Jennet becomes increasingly dangerous as the musical progresses.

Except for Mason, Colford and Wallace, who also plays the violin, the rest of the cast seems to have been chosen primarily for their excellent abilities at singing and dancing rather than acting.  From Wallace I would like a greater sense that the Queen is not just a Scottish Wicked Witch of the West, but also a fatally alluring creature.  The cast in general needs to project more and to articulate more clearly.  Given the Gaelic-influenced design by Wallace and the lovely Celtic-influenced costumes of David Juby, it seems peculiar that the cast do not speak with Scots accents.  To say Mason’s lines written in Scottish dialect like “I canna see thee nae mair” in a flat Ontario accent makes them sound all wrong.  More rehearsal and a dialect coach would work wonders in raising the level of the production from fairly good to excellent since the potential for excellence is clearly there.

Màiri Mason should be proud of writing a musical that I feel sure will be taken up by schools and community groups keen to explore their Scottish heritage.  The story, though is gripping and universal, and I hope that Mason’s musical version makes it known to as wide an audience as possible.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Amy Marie Wallace, Iain Stewart, Linnea Currie-Roberts, Vaughn Harris, Wesley J. Colford and Màiri Mason. ©2012 Epona Productions.

For tickets, visit http://fringetoronto.com.