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Ma Name Is Isabelle

 
Richard Beck Review by Richard Beck 5 Published: 20 Sep 2025 Keiller Shopping Centre Show Dates: 13 Sep 2025-14 Sep 2025

Theatre often affords rare opportunities, and at Dundee Fringe this week we had the chance to hear the delightfully evocative voice of Lucy Beth in her solo show Ma Name Is Isabelle.

An accomplished storyteller who has honed her craft with the skills that make for engagement

It comes as no surprise that Beth was nominated for the Artist of the Year award as part of the Scottish Emerging Talent Awards in 2024. She is an accomplished storyteller who has honed her craft with the skills that make for engagement. The varying paces and levels of delivery are embedded in the emotions of the storyline: sometimes soft and lyrical, carefully measuring the metre of rhyming couplets that assist the flow of the narrative, then in marked contrast raging with anger as the story becomes darker and she voices Isabelle’s frustrations.

Running for a tight 45 minutes, Beth introduces the story with an explanatory note in English regarding the language and style of the work. Why? Because the story itself is delivered in Doric, her native dialect from the north-east of Scotland, giving an aspect to the performance as intriguing as the story itself.

Many words are shared by both languages and others are so closely related in sound that their meaning in context is clear. Some words and expressions might be unknown to non-Doric speakers, but again the manner of delivery and setting allow for a good guess at what is being said.

It is Beth’s talent in that area that makes listening so easy and joyful. Seemingly lacking the harsher gutturals of Gaelic, the tone for the most part is mellifluous and the mood mellow, reflecting the pastoral Highland nature of the story. However, it can still be spat out with the throat fully engaged, especially when delivering words that end in “cht” and “ght”, with the tongue working overtime, rapidly vibrating the uvula at the alveolar ridge to produce the trill – the art of simply rolling your r’s.

The story is a reimagining of the famous bothy ballad Bogie’s Bonnie Belle, related from the protagonist’s perspective – an angle that historically has been overlooked. Isabelle is a young woman who was impregnated against her will by her lover, James, on her father’s farm. She expresses the challenges she faced in her relationship with James and the conflicts she endured as an unmarried mother whose pain was increased by the removal of her son. The tale highlights the strict moral codes of local communities and the church. The weight of inner shame, public disgrace and excommunication from the community that young women endured is matched in Isabelle’s case by her resilience, strength and triumph over adversity.

Ma Name Is Isabelle is a superbly told and powerful statement about female oppression and degradation that also bears witness to the courage of making a stand and fighting back.

Acknowledgements

The work was commissioned by Eden Court Theatre and Tobar an Dualchais/Kist O Riches, Scotland’s online resource dedicated to the presentation and promotion of audio recordings of the country’s cultural heritage, as part of the Scrieve Project for the 2024 Under Canvas festival. During the research and development process, Lucy collaborated with Kist O Riches Scots song cataloguer Chris Wright to research Belle’s experiences and present a speculative yet plausible depiction of what she may have endured.

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The Blurb:

A reimagining of the story behind the famous bothy ballad Bogie’s Bonnie Belle. Performed in Doric, this piece follows Isabelle, as she navigates being impregnated against her will, life as an unmarried mother and her triumph over adversity.