Put them together, however, as wacky Glasgow-based theatre company Fish and Game have done, and the result is something completely different.

The name Otter Pie came about as a joke, explains the company's co-artistic director Eilidh MacAskill, who plays Chris Guthrie, 'literary metaphor of the Scottish nation', in the production which is currently touring Scotland and arrives at the Traverse on Wednesday.

"We had some Australian visitors and convinced them we were going to a pub where you could get the special Scottish delicacy of otter pie," says MacAskill.

"It was a joke at that point, but in our minds it came to represent something really, really Scottish but also slightly unpalatable. Which helped us to picture this idea of a wonderful tradition and rich heritage which also has some strange baggage with it, something that doesn't taste quite right."

The production certainly manages to convey such a strange mixture. It combines a visual style that is pure Scots-kitsch with a performance style that moves with unerring logic from disco dance through ceilidh to surreal deconstruction of the theatre form, and plays the lot out with a weather eye on strict Calvinist morality, me-generation hedonism and the possibility that the world could be destroyed by a meteorite at any moment.

"First of all, we wanted to do something about Scottishness," explains MacAskill. "Robert Walton, my co-artistic director, is English - and we were both noticing within Scotland that that's an issue. We were grappling with that and the first thing we looked at was a book by Carol Craig called The Scots Crisis in Confidence, which named some of those difficulties that are maybe in the Scottish psyche. I recognised a lot of them in myself and we looked for some literary text dealing with that. Eventually we decided to try to pin it on Sunset Song."

Which just happens to be Scotland's - and incidentally Gordon Brown's - favourite book. And which has made for some seriously disgruntled audience members on the show's travels.

Some people who have come along expecting a piece of theatre that is true to Lewis Grassic Gibbon's novel, about Chris Guthrie and the coming of modernisation to traditional farming communities, all performed in Gibbon's famous 'speak of the Mearns'.

"We originally made the piece in the Glasgow Tramway," says MacAskill. "The audience there is quite knowing, they're used to seeing all sorts of live art, people doing shows with bloodletting and stuff, so they can be quite blasé.

"The audiences we've had in places like Musselburgh and Inverness are quite different. Somebody standing up and leaving and saying I don't want to see any more of this is quite exciting for us in a way - not that we want people to feel like that, but it makes a change for us, I think. Conversely we have had people saying that they have been really intrigued by it, or that they don't necessary understand it all, but they like it or find it interesting."

In Otter Pie, the company do - eventually - get around to performing Sunset Song. Or rather portraying certain elements of the book's plot on stage, while arguing about it among themselves and questioning whether its overwhelming pessimistic attitude is suitable to represent the feeling of modern Scotland.

Otter Pie, Traverse Theatre, Cambridge Street, Wednesday-November 29, 7.30pm, £8- £16, 0131-228 1404