Midsummer Loving

Genital mutilation, self-harm and fraught Arab-western relations: David Greig's bulging corpus of work has certainly tackled some weighty subjects. Two years ago, the Scottish playwright's updated version of Euripides' The Bacchae starring Alan Cumming thrilled audiences at the Edinburgh International Festival, as did his original work Damascus at the Traverse. Fast forward to 2009 and he's offering something a world away from Greek tragedy and conflict in the Middle East: Midsummer (A Play with Songs), a work that Greig cheerfully describes as a "lo-fi indie musical".

Written in collaboration with Gordon McIntyre, frontman of Edinburgh-based indie band, Ballboy, with a budget of around £1000, Midsummer premiered at the Traverse in October 2008 as part of its low-budget Traverse Too series. Clearly, its unashamedly romantic storyline was something of a relief for 40-year-old Greig, who has been known to produce plays at a rate of around five a year since his first professional production in 1992.

"Gordon and I wanted to know what a musical would be like if it featured music that we liked," he explains. "I didn't want an 'Important' play with a capital I, because I just needed a break. My creative self really needed a space to do some work that wasn't 'state of the nation', that wasn't expected to be 'state of the nation', and that wasn't a major new premiere."

The Edinburgh-set plot follows the exploits of Bob and Helena, who meet in a New Town bar on midsummer's night, sleep together and traipse around the city looking for excitement on the shortest night of the year. McIntyre's numbers pepper the action and the two actors—Cora Bissett and Matthew Pidgeon—play the instruments themselves, adding to the intimate, lo-fi feeling that pervades the play.

Though Midsummer isn't billed as a fully-fledged musical as such (McIntyre's songs complement the action, rather than drive it forward), some of the writers' objectives seem to have been similar. "When you go to a big musical show, you want to come out humming tunes with a big smile on your face," Greig says. "This is a lo-fi indie musical so it's not on the same scale and doesn't by any means have the same sort of ambitions. But at the same time, it does have a similar aim - which is to take you on an emotional journey and leave you feeling like you've had a good time."

Despite this feel-good motive, it's wrong to dismiss Midsummer merely as a vehicle for whimsy or fancy. Indeed, Greig believes that it also exposes the more serious sides to love. Almost laughing, he admits: "Ironically, the more that you release yourself from [political] burdens and write something entirely with the purpose of being frivolous, it turns out that those comedies delve into your deepest and most profound feelings. I didn't expect that and I was surprised that the sillier I was, the more serious I got."

Inevitably, the narrative capitalises on the more romantic aspects of the Scottish capital and Greig feels that there's something about a city—though not Edinburgh specifically—that inherently lends itself towards a romantic story-line. "If you look at great romantic comedies," he says, "a lot of them do have a specific location – so you're not just giving us a couple, you're also giving us the location in which the romance takes place. Maybe that's because we do that anyway – when you fall in love, you always remember the place in which it happens."

For Greig, the low monetary investment in Midsummer's Traverse Too premiere not only gave the play what he calls "the right to fail", it also allowed the playwright to make his language more theatrical in order to convey a sense of place, as its small budget left little room for intricate props. In the event, it received widespread plaudits, paving the way for its impending Fringe run at the Traverse and an accompanying tour of Ireland and Scotland in June and July, as well as Canada after the Festival.

Greig has just returned from Cork in Ireland, where Midsummer has appropriately enjoyed a run at the Cork Midsummer Festival—its first performance since its Edinburgh premiere—and initial reactions seem positive. He says: "Our first run in November was in the midst of the banking collapse and I wasn't sure whether the response to the play in Edinburgh was due to some sort of collective hysteria at the time. For me, it was a real thing to see if the play could travel and it seems to have done so." This sense of universality is likely to be a boon come August, when Midsummer will be performed in front of diverse Fringe audiences hailing from many different countries.

But while Midsummer represents a break with Greig's usual political fodder, he's far from leaving this powerful element of his work behind. "If you leaf through the Festival programme," he says, "there will be many shows—in fact, I'm writing some shows—about financial collapse and Darfur and the terrible, terrible loneliness of being alive. But sometimes that's not what you want. Sometimes you just want to connect with people and I think this is a connecting show."

And though Greig claims to be looking forward to the Festival season, this self-described "worrier" is clearly apprehensive – unjustifiably so, if critical and public reaction to date is anything to go by. He says: "For all I know, the Fringe will be absolutely heaving with lo-fi indie musicals. If that's the case, we'll be scunnered, but I assume that if all goes well then I will enjoy the Fringe very much."

Midsummer (a play with songs) Traverse Theatre 7-30 Aug (not Mondays) 7.30pm £14