First published in The Herald on 22 August, 2018

It’s 11.30pm on a Friday night in the festival and I’m outside, in the rain, staring at a wall. There is no bar on this side of Summerhall, no official performance space, but chairs and tables have been arranged on a little veranda facing the bare stone facade. An usher hands out sets of wireless headphones and tells us to wait.

And then a tiny epic unfolds. A miniature opera buffa. It lasts for nine minutes and it careens us through a grand drama of life, love, regret, violence, state-of-the-nation political commentary. The visuals are gritty and vivid, a street-art aesthetic laced with tender heart. The music is punchy, searing, propulsive, extravagant, apposite.

Brian Irvine and John McIlduff’s Drive By Shooting is opera, alright: this is no parody. Real voices, real orchestra, real techniques, real emotional impact. The fact it’s a looped graffiti projection with pre-recorded music delivered through headphones – that adds a dislocated, absurdist appeal, as though the dregs of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre had been distilled into a cartoon strip only to infiltrate your unsuspecting night out. Even in the midnight drizzle, the unlikeliness is a delight.

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First published in the Guardian on 15 August, 2018

Lads in tracksuits hurl themselves across the stage, all hoods and fists and aggro. There’s no music but screeching sirens and the dense thuds of bodies hitting floor and each other. Then the overture kicks in with a brute shock of sweet-voiced lutes and harpsichords. The contrast works like a punch in the gut, and the audience lets out a collective gasp.

Musical and moral collisions abound in any production of The Beggar’s Opera. John Gay’s 18th century satire is a gleeful period piece of irredeemably patchy values: heartthrob villain who makes gang crime look sexy and misogyny look cute; clingy damsels who paint a flagrantly unreconstructed portrait of the female psyche – meek or manipulative, or both. But The Beggar’s Opera is also a riot and a farce, wickedly funny when done right. It’s the original musical packed with tender airs and lusty sing-alongs. What’s a director to do? Ditch it? Dodge it? Rewrite it?

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Zimmer-frame opera to renaissance polyphony, Verdian comic gold to total piobaireachd immersion. My pick of music on the Edinburgh Fringe. Enjoy!

Drive By Shooting. An octogenarian discovers her husband has been having an affair with the next door neighbour. Armed with zimmer frames as getaway vehicles, she and a friend stage a hit on the cheating husband. The music builds as a fast and furious thriller, culminating in the immortal operatic line: “shoot the fecker in the pecker!” Composer Brian Irvine has a wicked way with words. The Belfast maverick plays with the daft pizazz of everyday speech, the big drama of Irish rhetoric. Drive By Shooting is a graffiti-style animated opera made in collaboration with writer/director John McIlduff, whose video loop is projected life-size onto a wall at Summerhall. Macabre, full-frontal comedy told through classic operatic idioms of passion, betrayal, revenge and fasle teeth. (Nine performances daily, 15 minutes duration, until August 26 at Summerhall)

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