Seven Deadly Sins

Scottish Opera's enthusiasm for finding new ways to produce opera, and to open up this apparently arcane art form, has seen them commission fifteen minute scores, inhabit unfamiliar venues - like Glasgow's Oran Mor, more usually a nightclub or gig spot - and collaborate with burlesque Club Noir. Trailing in at the end of the Fringe, they are visiting the HMV Picture House - a rock venue that was once an art deco cinema - for the appropriate historical ambiance for Kurt Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins.

Like Scottish Ballet, the company face the challenge of pleasing traditionalists and enticing new audiences: opera has a high art status that can be exclusive. Weill, however, has a cool Weimar elegance, and a way with a popular melody and a reputation for mixing and matching styles.

Another way that Scottish Opera by-pass the elitism associated with opera is their cunning choices of directors. Stewart Laing - currently directing Marc Almond at the Traverse in Ten Plagues - recast La Boheme in contemporary New York, and The Seven Deadly Sins sees Kally Lloyd-Jones at the helm.

Lloyd-Jones is better known as choreographer and artistic director of Company Cordelia, although "the first thing I did was la Boheme about ten years ago," she remembers. Aside from her only performance with the company, as a tree in one of the 5:15 series of short operas, she splits her time between her own company and her role as Scottish Opera's movement director.

Cordelia hit the fringe last year with Cabaret Cordelia - a gentle take on burlesque fashions and the songs of yesteryear - which featured a tenor alongside dancers. Directing an opera delights Lloyd-Jones: she admits that " I am excited by music and text and movement. It is fantastic to have a form, like opera, where you get to use all of them!"

Lloyd-Jones is as eclectic as Scottish Opera in her own work: she has ranged from the deconstruction of the dancer's life - long before it became this year's fad - in The Red Shoes to more intense, romantic interpretations of literature. Her approach to directing opera retains this particular energy. "You can have the music telling you one story, the text telling you another," she says. Adding in her own skill with movement, her setting of Seven Sins suggest sensuous secrets.

Opera may have a reputation for being conservative, old fashioned and an esoteric taste. Yet when it comes to Scotland, the national company are insisting that it is ready for a more than cosmetic make-over and can offer a relevant, engaging and even sexy perspective on theatre and life.