It’s the wee small hours at a recording studio somewhere in Nashville, Tennessee. Country music star Marcy Aurora is laying down her latest album – the first she’s released in over twenty years. We learn fairly quickly that she’s been in prison, for a violent crime she absolutely did commit. But she isn’t guilty about her past. Lee Papa’s script explores the cruelty of justice and the passing of the years, while also revealing a deep love of country music.

Marcy knows that her voice isn’t what it was – and the script gives us a series of abortive takes before we get to hear an uninterrupted number. But when she settles down to play Mary Hamilton, a Scottish ballad highly appropriate for this Edinburgh run, the show’s musical potential is revealed. As Marcy, Biz Lyon acts, sings, plays piano and guitar; amplifiers, sheet music and the detritus of production anchor us in the recording studio, a claustrophobic soundproofed space where tensions and frustrations can grow.

Sound engineer Coleen is also staying late, played here by Catherine Mieses. In an interesting gambit, Mieses spends most of her time off-stage, delivering her lines over a speaker (just as in the recording studio, she’s talking from the other side of the glass). On the day I attended, that did seem to cause a few crashed lines and some half-missed beats – though it’s always possible that some of the interruptions are intentional. More significantly, when Coleen eventually arrives on stage, it’s tricky to reconcile the hesitant character we see with the sassy voice we’ve been listening to; there’s a reason why she’s reticent in Marcy’s presence, but that doesn’t fully explain how different she seems when she’s talking on the microphone.

It’s a shame, too, that the critical back-story is revealed through the audio of an archive interview, which the two characters listen to relatively impassively. Surely there’s an opportunity to build some more connection here. But in contrast, a scene where we listen in on Marcy’s side of a video-call interview is a dramatic highlight, revealing both her piquant motivations and the frustration she feels at being defined by her past. The conclusion to the story passes swiftly but affecting too, revealing an unspoken but crucial reason behind the choices Marcy made.

There’s an important topic at the heart of this storyline, a lesson on how even powerful-seeming women can find themselves without the means of escape. It could, perhaps, be a little more tightly told, and more obviously related back to the country music that Marcy so clearly loves. As it stands though, Midnight In Nashville is an interesting, impactful story of a middle-aged woman defiantly finding her way back into the world… and that’s a tale that has resonance beyond its time and place.