An absolute super trouper

"It hasn't made the slightest difference to my appetite for work, but Mamma Mia! has made it possible for me to panic less about periods of unemployment and to buy time to prepare other shows." After creating the spectacular Abba musical in five countries, three continents and, shortly, its first foreign-language incarnation, hasn't Phyllida Lloyd had enough? The soft-centred Seventies tunes with their naff lyrics are a long way from the work with which the director established her reputation as one of Britain's most serious directorial talents.

Mamma Mia!, which she describes as "an absolute miracle in my life", has taken her to openings in Melbourne, in Toronto and on Broadway. Despite the fame and fortune it has brought, she's back in Leeds, working with the company she calls home. "I'm very involved with Opera North and I feel great loyalty to the people here who've nurtured me over the past decade."

It was the former Opera North bosses Nicholas Payne and Paul Daniel who, having seen Lloyd's innovative productions at Bristol's Old Vic and Manchester's Royal Exchange, persuaded her to try her hand at opera with Chabrier's l'Etoile. Since then, while maintaining a profile in the theatre, she's given Opera North audiences new takes on operatic favourites such as Carmen and La Bohème, explored rarer repertoire such as Cherubini's Médée, and enjoyed unparalleled success with Britten's Gloriana.

The catalyst for her latest venture, Britten's comic opera Albert Herring, was Dame Josephine Barstow, with whom she collaborated on Médée and, at English National Opera, Poulenc's Les Dialogues des Carmélites. "Jo had recorded the role of Lady Billows in Albert Herring but had never actually played the part on stage. I wanted to work with her again, and whatever she asked me to direct her in, frankly, I'd jump at it. I've always admired her intensity and remarkable powers of transformation.

"I was hesitant about doing Albert Herring at first, worrying that it might be a bit of a Vicar of Dibley experience, but when I listened to it I fell in love with it. It's irresistible – an exquisite score, a wonderful libretto, so quintessentially English. It's about people's terror, their fear of life and change. Those petty parochial attitudes and the eternal resonances that the opera conjures up still live on in many places."

The small-town life and characters of a Maupassant short story at the turn of the last century were transported by Britten and his librettist, Eric Crozier, from Normandy to the Suffolk coast in 1947. A young greengrocer, dominated by his mother, is crowned May King in the absence of a suitably virtuous girl to be May Queen. He later disgraces himself in the eyes of the local worthies by disappearing for a night on the razzle. As Lloyd puts it: "Albert could have become a rent boy and a crack addict, and probably would have done if the opera had been written in 2002!" But while the effects of spiking people's drinks may ring true for some teenagers, it seems a tame kind of sequel to her earthy "Carmen for the kids".

She disagrees. "Albert Herring is very much a story about youth and old age and of one generation trying to prevent the next from flowering, or even existing. I think young people will identify with Herring's relationship with his mother, the tyranny of parents over children and how we break free of that.

"In a sense, the co-dependency that Albert and his mother share, and the security he recognises while tied to her apron-strings, has a kind of attraction for him. And yet, in the agony of his impotence and the apparent impossibility of ever changing that status quo, in the dark heart of Herring, where 'the only way out was a wild explosion', I've discovered a lot of pain and rage. What's harder to create is the tension among the characters that are more satirically drawn, to stop them slipping into The Archers."

Lloyd is adamant that only the singer playing Herring, Iain Paton, knows what happened to him on the night he went Awol. "Whatever it is – and we're not making it explicit – it's tinged with a lot of shame, pain and disappointment, a loss as well as a gain." She senses a deep ambiguity in the piece but is clear that Britten was expressing his terror at confronting his own sexuality, and perhaps also drawing on his own relationship with his mother.

Apart from one extended scena for Albert, it's an ensemble piece, with village tradespeople, ball-bouncing children and a pair of lovers on the one hand and Loxford society, led by the stuffy elderly autocrat Lady Billows, on the other. "I'm very conscious of how I build teams. In international opera productions, people sometimes scarcely know each other, but actors are totally reliant on one another to create the tempos and the rhythm. I focused here on what kind of actor, dramatic person or spirit each might be, rather than the dream Britten voice. Albert Herring comes with quite a lot of baggage about who is right for this role and that, but I've tried to avoid stereotype in casting."

Lloyd is working for the first time with the American designer Scott Pask, whose UK theatre credits are few (most recently, Christopher Hampton's Tales from Hollywood at the Donmar) and whose opera credits are even fewer (Orfeo in Chicago). "We're trying to strip it of its Edwardiana, to test whether the experience the piece is describing is a universal one."

Isn't there a danger that anything she does will be a tiny bit touched by Mamma Mia!? "It affects most aspects of my life now. Everything overlaps, but it's the same person in rehearsal for everything. Besides, they're all part of one picture – Mamma Mia! is about lost parents and so is the Ring, if you think about it. The problem isn't so much about reconciling different projects as establishing the shape of one's work. So far, I've avoided opportunities of running theatres, though a friend did ask me to apply as a double act for one of the recent vacant posts."

It's a tantalising prospect but one that is firmly on the back burner for now. In the meantime, there's her long-awaited Macbeth, postponed by the Royal Opera in 1997. "I'm apprehensive about how changed the world is since then, but I'm seasoning it with lots of fear and adrenalin..." A couple of film ideas are under consideration, and Lloyd would like to do more plays, especially Shakespeare. Her Copenhagen production of Poul Ruder's opera of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is promised at ENO, where Payne and Daniel now are, and where she is also committed to a Ring cycle in 2004. Two years is not a long time in epic terms, and for Lloyd, the heat is on.

'Albert Herring', Leeds Grand Theatre, tomorrow and 5, 7, 13 & 15 March; also tours Newcastle, Salford Quays, Nottingham and Hull. Details: 0113-244 5326