Focus on: Drive-By Shooting

From an overheard conversation in a Dublin Bar to a "street opera", Irish company Dumbworld are out to show that there's no rules to making operatic works

feature (edinburgh) | Read in About 3 minutes
Published 26 Jul 2018
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“This opera is based on a conversation I overheard in a bar in Dublin,” says director and filmmaker John McIlduff of the Irish multidisciplinary production company Dumbworld, which he leads with composer Brian Irvine. "It was a pair of old women, and one of them was joking about her husband sleeping around and how she’d have him done in – the kind of conversation you hear in Dublin!" Drive-By Shooting, then, takes these two imagined old ladies as its central characters, and follows their quest to—as McIlduff has it—“shoot the fecker in the pecker”. 

Originally seen as a 10-minute performance in Dublin’s GPO building, with live opera singers and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra performing, the success of the piece led to Dumbworld being offered funding by Dublin City Council to make a film of the show. “We weren’t sure, though, because we know opera films don’t have a very big audience,” says McIlduff. “So we discussed it and decided that perhaps a piece of street art might be more appropriate.” 

Dumbworld’s history suggests they’re well-placed for this kind of reimagining, with a lengthy and productive track record which includes the 2014 series of "street operas" Things We Throw Away (the original home of Drive-By Shooting), and last year’s 100-strong crowdsourced musical theatre chorus on the subject of migration, Let Me Count the Ways. “We’re very keen on recontextualising opera, because mainstream opera is very difficult for people to see ordinarily,” says McIlduff. “At the Dublin Theatre Festival the cheapest tickets were €35, which a lot of people just can’t afford. So we thought, let’s put Drive-By Shooting out on the street and let people experience it for themselves.” 

The piece—a film of the Drive-By Shooting performance—appears on the wall “like a Banksy”, he says, and then begins to move. The soundtrack is broadcast through headphones, although with dynamic titling it can be read and experienced close-up or a couple of streets away from the work. “It’s absolutely an opera for people who don’t like opera,” laughs McIlduff. “Wherever we’ve shown it before, it’s been in a big public space where everyone can have a chance to experience and enjoy it. 

“Our viewpoint is that it doesn’t matter what the art is,” he continues. “There can be a lot of barriers which keep people from enjoying it, from going into opera houses, but there can be an inroad for everybody. This is a funny, short, interesting piece with a social commentary going on—because these women are looking to go to jail so they can get free healthcare while they’re in there—and it’s open to a far wider audience than might normally experience opera.”