You thought it was just another tawdry late-night TV show. Think again. JERRY SPRINGER THE OPERA is an exhilarating clash between high art and low comedy. Words: Mark Fisher

It has a cast of 21, a chorus of ten, a live band, a demanding score and a libretto that goes ‘What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fucky fuck fuck’ over a diminished scale. So, as you can imagine, Jerry Springer: The Opera has phenomenal word of mouth. It’s one of those dream concepts that catches everyone’s imagination. Jerry Springer and opera: that’s funny right? And extra buzz about this opera-comedy clash has been generated because of the way it’s been put together by Stewart Lee, stand-up turned director, and Richard Thomas, whose CV includes an opera called Tourette’s Diva.

They have slowly built this tribute to telly’s king of dysfunctional relationships from tentative concert performances to try-out first act, all the time getting audience feedback and pointers about which way to head next. ‘It’s evolved in a weird, Labour Party-style public partnership with its financial supporters,’ laughs Lee.

So although its official debut is not until now in Edinburgh, it has already attracted attention on a global scale. Its try-out in February at the Battersea Arts Centre drew audiences from as far afield as New York as well as promoters including Cameron Mackintosh, Andrew Lloyd Webber and National Theatre director Nick Hytner. There and then, Lee and Thomas were given offers of a West End run.

Luckily for us they resisted. This is Lee’s 15th consecutive year on the Fringe and Thomas is not far behind with 11 visits. The festival is their artistic home and they wanted to give the show one last tweak for Edinburgh, cutting 40 minutes of good but not quite perfect material before what seems like the inevitable commercial transfer. ‘I wanted to do it right, to really finish it off,’ says Thomas, a self-taught composer. ‘And Edinburgh’s a great place to do it. It’s the greatest festival on earth.’

Lee and Thomas are two men who know they’re on a roll. Sitting opposite me in a quiet corner above their Clapham rehearsal room, they babble away in a high-speed barrage of enthusiasm, the one barely giving room for the other to speak. ‘I thought we’d get a real backlash from the opera crowd,’ says Thomas. ‘That it would be seen as too lowbrow or undignified. But in fact, they really liked it.’

Lee chips in: ‘I don’t know anything about opera, so I just treated it like a comedy script that needed editing. But then when the opera people were coming in and going: “This is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen,” I went and saw some opera and I thought, well, it probably is. If you’ve only ever seen West End musicals or opera, this is probably astonishing. It’s written by people who have worked in comedy and know what is really funny, instead of what someone wrongly imagines as funny.’

Set in the dying days of The Jerry Springer Show, the first act features three sets of guests with guilty secrets. Interspersed are solos in which they reveal their real secrets (the man who says he likes to wear diapers really likes shitting his pants).

Act two is set inside the mind of Jerry Springer as he descends into hell. The two men have used the conventions of the TV programme to inform the opera. ‘In Jerry Springer,’ says Lee, ‘he says: “What’s your problem then?” and you’re straight into where you want to be. The programme has really harsh edits. That means you dispense with intros and outros or having to have things that are in the same key thrown together.’

The idea first came to Thomas as he watched The Jerry Springer Show and saw lots of fat people shouting at each other incoherently: just like in opera. ‘Opera is an extreme form,’ he says. ‘So if you’re going to write an opera, you may as well use an extreme subject. If the guests are screaming at each other – ‘You pervert, you sicko, you motherfucker” – the music can go against that: the subtext can come through.’

The two had a meeting with Springer himself (‘I think of him as Saint Mephistopheles,’ says Thomas), who gave his tacit agreement to the project and may even turn up in person when he appears at the Edinburgh Television Festival. Are there any legal complications I ask? ‘Er…’ says Thomas, uncharacteristically panicked. ‘I can’t really say.’

So why does he think it’s taking off in such a big way? ‘It genuinely is pretty funny,’ he says. ‘It’s tight. It’s not boring. All the things you associate with opera, it isn’t. But musically, we’ve got fantastic singers who have to be really good because it’s complex stuff. I get a kick from the fact that people might be laughing over some serious, complex music.’