Scots Opera Project prepares to launch new Scots language version of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas

But let’s go back a bit. Why perform opera in Scots at all? For David Douglas – the Scots Opera Project’s founder, director, and often starring tenor too – it’s all about inclusion. “I speak Scots, and many people in Scotland also speak Scots,” he says, “or they at least have a knowledge of it. So I think doing opera in Scots has broken down barriers – it feels like something people can relate better to.”

Down in London, English National Opera translates all its operas from their original German, Italian, French, Russian or whatever other tongue into English – for similar reasons of accessibility, immediacy and appreciation of dramatic detail. It’s a philosophy that Douglas knows well from his extensive work with the company. “So I thought: what’s the equivalent up here? It’s obviously Scots and Gaelic, the languages that are predominantly spoken here.” Translating has the positive side-effect, too, of encouraging a love of opera more broadly, Douglas explains: “I’ve seen a lot of people we’ve worked with at Scottish Opera productions. They never would have gone in the past, but they feel it’s something that belongs to them as well.”

There are deeper questions, of course, of protecting, promoting and celebrating Scotland’s languages – something that has led to the Company’s more recent embrace of Gaelic. But with fewer speakers in more narrowly defined geographical areas, Gaelic raises inevitable questions of comprehensibility – to which Douglas has devised a neat solution. “Gaelic is always used for a repeat of a line in a production, so you will have already heard it in Scots – hopefully that way you’ll still understand the Gaelic without actually speaking any Gaelic.” He points to Dido and Aeneas’s most famous aria – tear-jerking closer ‘When I am laid in earth’ – as an example where repeated lines allow for both languages to be heard. And he’s brought in Gaelic specialists – including broadcaster and singer Joy Dunlop – for coaching on authentic pronunciation. “It’s prompted me to do an intensive Gaelic course myself on Skye, and I’ve loved learning the language – it’s opened up all kinds of different possibilities.”

It’s not the first time that the company has tackled Purcell’s one-act tragedy: a 2018 staging in Irvine drew strongly on local performers. The Pitlochry production, however, will be on a more elaborate scale, and sets out to exploit the outdoor setting of the Festival Theatre’s amphitheatre. “We’re going to take in the natural environment – we’re surrounded by trees there. We’re setting it in a mythical Celtic Scotland: our Dido is a kind of warrior queen, and the Sorceress is more like a forest witch with her tree elves helping her.”

As in Irvine, Douglas plans to bring in local performers to embed the show even more deeply within the southern Highlands. “The Pitlochry Festival Theatre has a Show Choir anyway, and they’ve been working on the opera choruses. Then we’ll have a week of intensive rehearsals before the opening.”

Directing a production, let alone an entire opera company, is something that Douglas admits wasn’t necessarily in his early career plans. But it’s something he’s clearly thrown himself into passionately – amid the multifarious roles he takes in the company, and his singing roles elsewhere.

The Scots Opera Project is an organisation that’s developing fast, and leaving increasingly vivid marks on communities across the country, whether they’re listeners or performers.

The Scots Opera Project’s production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre on 31 August, and on 1, 7, 8, 14 and 15 September