Rock opera inspired by Mary Queen of Scots to be launched at Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Show will draw parallels with treatment of women in music industry and doomed monarch

She has been an iconic figure in Scottish history for centuries.

But now Mary Queen of Scots is about to be reinvented...as a rock music icon.

The story of the doomed 16th century monarch is to be turned into a rock opera which will premiere at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Mary, Queen of Rock! will be staged at the Assembly Rooms at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

And its creators have ambitions to take the new musical - Mary, Queen of Rock! - to London’s West End.

It will reimagine Mary’s story on her return from France to the country of her birth in 1561 as a world-leading musical artist who finds the rock and roll has been outlawed by John Knox in post-Reformation Scotland.

The show, which is being created by Edinburgh-based theatre company Pretty Knickers Productions, will draw analogies between the life faced by Mary and the misogyny faced by female singers and musicians in the music industry up to the present day.

It will recall Mary’s tussles with John Knox, a pivotal figure in the Protestant Reformation of Scotland, and a life marred by troubled marriages, betrayal, rebellion and murder to explore why powerful women have been faced with men trying to undermine and abuse them throughout history.

Mary, Queen of Rock! will be staged at the Assembly Rooms at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Written by Cal Ferguson, Mhairi McCall and Lewis Lauder, who will also perform in the show at the Assembly Rooms, the rock opera is being launched by the company after two Fringe runs of Salamander, a play exploring the aftermath of a murder of a sex worker in 1980s Edinburgh.

Ferguson, who came up with the original idea for the new show while on holiday in France, said: “It felt very ambitious and challenging at first.

"There has obviously been so much written about Mary Queen of Scots, and so many films and TV shows. We felt we had to try to put our own twist on her story and make it original.”

"We started thinking about why we would want to tell her story and how we could modernise it. For fun, I thought: ‘Why don’t we make her a rock star?’ Once we started the research we realised it could be a fantastic show. I didn't realise quite how turbulent and dramatic her life was.”

Mary, Queen of Rock! - a new musical inspired by Mary, Queen of Scots - will be staged at the Assembly Rooms at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

McCall said: “I would be the first to admit that I didn’t know much about Mary other than the main facts about her story. We listened to hours of audio books and podcasts. We realised her story was so dense. One of our biggest challenges was how to get it into a one-act musical.

"We really started to brainstorm how the show could work at the end of last year and started writing it in January. The three of us have spent a lot of time together working on it. It's a real melting point of all our ideas, but I think it’s all the better for that.

"We’ve taken a big leap with this show, but with the belief that we’ve got something really strong and it will pay off.”Stevie Nicks, Debbie Harry, Avril Lavigne, Beyonce, Britney Spears and Taylor Swift are among the acts said to be inspiring the show, along with bands like The Rolling Stones and AC/DC.

Ferguson added: "The show starts with Mary returning to Scotland from France as an adult in 1961. In our imagined universe, the Scottish Reformation has not seen a ban on Catholicism, but a ban on rock and roll. John Knox is the head of Presbyterian Records.

A new musical inspired by Mary, Queen of Scots - Mary, Queen of Rock! - will be launched at the Assembly Rooms at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Picture: Culture Club/Getty Images

"Mary arrives in Scotland as a Catholic rocker and wants to go out on tour, but is constantly blocked by Knox and the Scottish nobles, who try to change her style and image. The story will roughly follow the same beats and patterns of her life, but will be twisted into a musical style.”

McCall said: “It will be a hugely entertaining and moving show, which will tell a story that is very relevant nowadays.

"It will draw a lot of parallels between the treatment of Mar and the treatment of women in the music industry. That's the real heart of the show.

"Women who have become huge stars like Taylor Swift and Beyonce are still under a huge amount of scrutiny that just would not happen to their male peers.

"As a society, we love to build up women from such a young age and put them on a pedestal and then just destroy them or tear them down.

"It will be a very accessibly Scottish show, but we think it will work for audiences everywhere. We always hope there will be an after-life for our shows, but with the success of historical musicals like Six and Hamilton we are hoping it will transfer to the West End. That’s definitely the goal and the dream.”

Mhairi McCall is one of the creators of the new rock opera Mary, Queen of Rock! will be staged at the Assembly Rooms at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Lana Pheutan, who is directing the Fringe show, said: “After eight years of Pretty Knickers Productions, our latest show seems like everything we’ve been building up to.

"For me as a director, it is an absolute dream, the script is rich, playful and truly Scottish, the music is sensational and the world that we are creating is somewhere I'm going to be delighted to spend a lot of time in as we kick-start rehearsals.

"The entire team is incredible and we're all grafting harder than ever before to ensure this is our most daring and successful show yet.

"I'm so excited to be bringing one of Scotland's most well known women's stories to the Fringe in such a bold way.

"Audiences are in for a real treat. It's going to be loud, it's going to be raucous and it's going to be rock and roll.”