Alice, or the Scottish Gravediggers

Alice Butler, a young orphan working as a serving girl in her aunt’s inn, is torn. Two of the inn’s lodgers – the wealthy Sir Jack Spleen and the poor but dashing medical student Edward Belton – are vying for her attention. As their competition takes a dark turn, it is soon not simply Alice’s future that is at stake, but her very life.

Arriving in time for the Halloween season, this sinister French melodrama from 1829 is René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt’s take on one of the most gruesome and notorious scandals of his day – the Burke & Hare murders, in which the victims’ corpses were sold for use in medical dissections.

Premiering a brand-new translation and presenting the play in English for the first time anywhere, Polybe + Seats further explores its backdrop – a moment in medical history when doctors and anatomists routinely paid top dollar for the freshest corpses available. Moving between London and the Scottish Highlands, this alternately bizarre, hilarious, and heartbreaking story explores the meaning of “sacrifice” by asking, “What are you willing to give to get what you want?”