Interviewing David McVicar is not simply a matter of asking a question and waiting for the answer

Interviewing David McVicar is not simply a matter of asking a question and waiting for the answer. From first question to last he is liable to turn the tables, interrogating the interrogator. Perhaps it’s about stage-managing the process, for McVicar is a director sought after by opera houses all over the world: his 1999 English National Opera staging of Handel’s Alcina was nominated for an Olivier Award, and earlier this year he directed the same composer’s Agrippina in Brussels and Paris. His Glyndebourne production of Puccini’s La Bohÿme, no doubt ruffling a few feathers with its T-shirted bohemians snorting cocaine, is currently touring Next year he makes his Covent Garden début. The New York Met follows in 2002.
McVicar, 34, first worked in opera in 1993, after considerable success in the theatre.

He bristles at the idea that not all theatre directors like working in opera: “Why do you make a differentiation? Why do you say ‘theatre’ director?” Yet the sense emerges that McVicar feels rejected by the theatre – “straight” theatre, “spoken” theatre – because he does so much work in the opera house. “I haven’t worked in spoken theatre for years,” he says with some asperity. “I couldn’t get arrested in the theatre.”In any case, he doesn’t think opera or its practitioners lack for anything dramatic: “My work in spoken theatre was musical, in terms of using language as music, and of being interested in questions of tempo through an evening. If you direct singers in that way, if you treat them like actors, then they’ll act for you. Some singers tell me that other directors are not interested in getting inside their heads. They presume there’s nothing there, especially if they’re tenors and sopranos, but I’ve never done an opera where I didn’t base the interpretation of character on the positive qualities which that particular singer can offer …

I am there to find out whether they connect with the text, whether they’re using that text.”For McVicar, it matters little whether that text is sung in the original language, or in translation: “The only thing I’m against is the f–king surtitles They’re anti-theatre I can’t stand them. In La Bohÿme, the dialogue moves too fast for surtitles; what you get is a truncated, bastardised version. The audience would understand a lot more from watching the stage than from reading the surtitles.”McVicar has tackled repertoire from Handel to Britten and on to Sondheim (he staged Sweeney Todd at Opera North in 1998). Nevertheless he’s careful about what he takes on: “I am a baroque person, an 18th-century person. I understand the form, I don’t have a problem with the structures, whereas I do have a problem with the structures of 19th-century opera. For me, the dramaturgy of much of Verdi is clunky, melodramatic, non-sexual: too 19th century. It’s like the characters in 19th-century novels who have no sex lives; something that is fundamental to human motivation is dreadfully missing.

Whereas Puccini is the most sexually explicit of all composers. The eroticism of the Act One duet in Madama Butterfly is pornographic, far more erotic than Tristan und Isolde. When you listen to that music, there is no doubt whatsoever about what is going on.”Madama Butterfly is the opera that currently preoccupies him. He is back in his native Glasgow, preparing a new staging for Scottish Opera, and has strong ideas about the opera: “I hate the fashion for trying to turn Butterfly into a tale of American colonial oppression.

It’s not: the Americans did not colonise Japan, the meeting between the two countries was an economic bargain that was profitable to both sides. Puccini was interested in the socio-political aspects of Butterfly, but he knew that what would hold his audience was that this is a story about a woman in effect waiting for the phone to ring. It’s an experience that most people have been through: being lied to, deserted, putting your love somewhere it doesn’t belong.”The suggestion that Puccini’s eagerness to kill off his heroines betrays his musical cruelty is immediately countered: “It’s too glib to say that Puccini had this sadistic streak, that he needed to see his sopranos suffer That’s facile. You notice that, from Mimi in La Bohÿme onwards, the women get tougher, their capacity to suffer is greater. I think Puccini is envious of the depth of existence that women experience.