BEYOND the Celtic twilight are a sea of stories you'll never find in libraries, and are generally told these days only by bearded men with grand delusions of faraway glaikitness sitting round artificial campfires. All the more reason, then, for Margaret McSeveney's play to come blinking into the light with this first in a proposed trilogy that reworks Arthurian legends in Scotland's own image.

Here we find goddesses of the old religion casting spells beyond their ken, as head honcho of the pagans digs his heels in while all about him are converting. Queen Anna has already bowed down, but it is their exiled teenage daughter Tennoch who is the chosen one. In care and captivity of her uncle Arthur, Tennoch is a kind of Buffy The Vampire Slayer figure, but with a more whimsical, airy-fairy, altogether less wisecracking bent. Watched over by her future spirit, her getting of wisdom comes via immaculate conception, as she moves out, changes her image, and hitches up on the long road in search of herself.

Despite minimal resources, Charles Nowosielski's production for Theatre Alba invests in a sweep of imagination that cries out for a big stage to transcend a story that is as big as a Greek tragedy or biblical epic, if only it could rip out the po-faced romance that attempts to leaven things for the unenlightened. Neither is it helped by a score that sounds like it's soundtracking an ad for Scotch Mist PLC.

With Kirstin Smith a pale and wan Tennoch, this is still a rich and vivid tale of reinvention and renewal that rumbles with true sensuality, and which, tidied up, might make for something magnificent.