This Changeling Self, Radio 4’s lead drama this week, clearly ought to have gone out in August. It’s set — and was recorded — at the Edinburgh Festival and would have been a gift to marketing. ‘I love the festival!’ coos She. ‘All these millions of conversations, listen, listen, oh and stories, lots of stories, the different ways of telling…!’
No one in the real world speaks like this. But it’s just about OK, because she isn’t quite real either. She is a Fairy Queen, come to Edinburgh to spirit away a young pianist named Tam, as in Tamlin, who is a bit wet but really rather nice. The story is a modern retelling by Linda Marshall Griffiths of an old Scottish ballad that couldn’t be better suited to radio.
The Fairy Queen, breathy yet exuberant, steals the heart of the gentlemanly Tam (Sacha Dhawan) when she picks out the notes of his song on her violin. She warns him not to look into her eyes or he’ll forget how to think. Too late. He is carried off. She is Siren-like, but mesmerised by his music in turn. She wants to keep him. But she is a changeling, belongs to another world, another time. Two Edinburgh festivals for him mean seven years in her world. They have a baby. In what realm and in what form can it exist?
As each narrates their story, their voices are out of sync yet frequently collide, layered so you feel the sad impossibility of their relationship. They meet in (occasionally strained) dialogue and in music, their chemistry audible. It’s all very ethereal and otherworldly, but then, isn’t Edinburgh in August?
If anyone could see off the fiddling Fairy Queen it’s Nicola Benedetti. The Scottish violinist was a guest last week on The Open Ears Project, a new podcast hosted by Clemency Burton-Hill that describes itself as ‘part mixtape, part sonic love letter’.
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