Every year, 2,400 pink-footed geese arrive from Greenland to winter at Fala Flow, a peat bog in the Lammermuir Hills, south-east of Edinburgh. The village of Fala is the home of singer-songwriter Karine Polwart, and this intimate solo show is her hymn to the gentle Midlothian landscape: to its birds, its insects, its plants and trees, and its human inhabitants past, present and future.
This is Polwart’s first piece of theatre, but she’s a natural storyteller and steers a path effortlessly between personal memoir, anecdote, gig, philosophical musings, history and nature lecture. Her language is rich and poetic, and speaks of her deep connection with – and love for – this countryside. “I’m filled up with space at Fala Moor,” she tells us. Its peatbogs are “the lungs of our land”.
She tells stories of childbirth. Her own; the quiet tragedy of a friend who barely 20 years ago didn’t survive to hold her firstborn; a young married couple, Will and Roberta, who began their brief life together nearly a century ago in Fala village, and of the medieval hospital and sanctuary founded in the 12th century at nearby Soutra Aisle. The plants the monks cultivated to ease pain, mend bones, bring sleep, still grow: Polwart decants their seeds from test tubes and grinds them with a pestle and mortar, listing in a sing-song chant their properties, good and ill.
The weft to the narrative’s warp are the songs. I’d have liked to know more about the music – were the traditional tunes from the same Borders region? What is their story? With guitar, harmonium, keyboard or thumb harp, Polwart sings or speaks, and duets with herself over her whispered, looped voice. Pippa Murphy’s sound design brings the cries of the birds, the chirrups of insects and simply the hum of the moor itself to the small Lyceum studio stage.
Lest this all sounds a little serious or sentimental, a twinkle is never far from Polwart’s eye. Who knew that the waterboatman is the noisiest creature on the planet relative to its size? I loved her description of her teenage self forming an all-girl football squad “despite being told football was bad for us ‘down there’”, and her turn as a commentator at the 1983 European Cup Winners’ Cup final in which Aberdeen, led by Alex Ferguson, snatched victory in the final minutes. “It never gets better for Aberdeen,” she deadpans.
It’s Ferguson who leads us back to the wild geese that began the show. “Remember the geese,” he used to tell his champion Scottish team. The teamwork of the birds – their rotating V-formation that minimises wind resistance to save energy – should inspire us all. Ultimately, Polwart’s message is an environmental one. She sings Rivers Run, a song she wrote for her young son:
This weary earth we walk upon / She will endure when we are gone / You know I don’t believe it’s true / That in this world there’s nothing new / For darling, you have just begun / Rivers flow and rivers run
•Until 21 August. Box office: 0131-473 2000.
