The Bloody Great Border Ballad Project

Lorne Campbell, artistic director of Northern Stage, is looking pleased as punch. And well he might: he has curated something down at St Stephen's chuch that's just a little bit special. Freewheeling, slightly shambolic and absolutely heartfelt, this is about artists responding to the prospect of Scottish independence. In a way that, perhaps, might seem a little bit passé in a few years time, they do so with what Campbell perfectly describes as a "powerful, beautiful lack of irony", attempting to imagine what a future Scotland might look and feel like.

To that end, Campbell has commissioned artists to write border ballads for the modern age – the border having taken on new importance since Sir Walter Scott collected his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border at the dawn of the nineteenth century. And that's as specific as the remit is. So, tonight, Scottish actor and director Cora Bissett's sweet, nostalgic tale about the family "turn" couldn't be more different to Englishman Alex Kelley's acutely articulated sense of wonder in his astrophysics lecture. A final section sees a new verse added every evening to an increasingly epic ballad about a child, Anabel, born on the eve of the referendum.

There's a common thread to all of these endeavours. Poets, Shelley famously claimed, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Away from politicians' squabbles over how to administer a kingdom, united or otherwise, it feels like the real business of re-imagining a political community is being taken up on stages like tonight's. It feels awfully important.