Táin ★★★★ Scottish Storytelling Centre (Venue 30) until 25 August Welcomed into the compact George Mackay Brown library upstairs at the Scottish Storytelling Centre with a nip of whisky and a piece of shortbread, the audience appears to be receiving a promise that they’ll have a storytelling experience as trad and tourist-friendly as everything that’s going on outside on the Royal Mile. Yet what they receive is a full-blooded and enriching new version of an old folk tale, with an intriguing electric and electronic score. In fact the story being told in Táin is Irish, not Scottish, and we just hope all the tourists in the audience can tell the difference.
The Táin Bó Cúailnge, in fact, is one of Ireland’s great defining mythical stories, a part of the Ulster Cycle in which Queen Medb of Connacht decides to raid Ulster with her army in order to capture the great bull Donn Cúailnge, but finds opposition from the fierce warrior Cú Chulainn. Young Edinburgh Storytellers Mark Borthwick and David Hughes deliver a version of the story which feels fresh and compelling, grounding it both in ordinary language and in a sense of the expansively believable, at least in terms of the characters’ motivations. The pair leave their listeners feeling as though they’d had a glimpse into a wider world of godlike magical warriors, yet the base motivations of lust, greed and offended honour at the heart of the tale are immediate and relatable.
The pair also fail to go.