Word about the oddly named Fish & Game duo of Eilidh MacAskill and Robert Walton has been trickling out through the theatrical grapevine in Scotland since they showcased an earlier version of this show last year.

I missed that outing but I am glad to have caught up with it now. In fact, anyone who is remotely serious about theatre in Scotland should see it on its present tour. These are original and talented thinkers and theatre-makers and, while they are some way off being the finished article, I have not been so intrigued or challenged by a new show from Scotland for a long time.

The phrase “otter pie”, allegedly a Scottish delicacy, was apparently dreamt up to tease some Australian friends. It became an in-company reference for anything quintessentially Scottish but faintly unpalatable, from porridge to the Caledonian antisyzygy (the trait of Scots being all self-important swagger one minute and all forelock-tugging cringe the next). If you suspect that the show will therefore tread the well-worn furrow of Scottish self-analysis, you would be partly right. But the combination of ideas, styles, jokes, songs and semiotics is unlike anything you will have seen before.

Explicitly, it references Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s iconic novel, Sunset Song, as a locus of Scottish identity, still powerful 100 years on. But you are unlikely to have seen, as here, the central events of the novel depicted in a series of robotic dance moves to a 1980s American jazz-funk track.

The six-strong company, with the commanding figure of MacAskill dominating the stage as Chris Guthrie, and Walton directing, throw in just about every Post-Modern performance-art trope going. At one point, when they started throwing bags of soil on to the stage (“Only the land endures,” as Grassic Gibbon says) with kitsch ceilidh music playing in the background, it felt like something from a Pina Bausch show.

Not all of it works; technically the show is a mixture of ambitious precision and shambolic missed cues; performances are mixed; intellectually, it hits some targets, misses others and does a fair amount of damage along the way. But there is a relish for the theatrical, for Scottishness in all its weirdness, for asking big questions even if you don’t have all the answers, which is distinctly bracing.

Touring Scotland until Dec 6 2008; www.otterpie.org

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