OPERA / Interview: A question of attitude: Tim Albery, currently directing Verdi's Don Carlos in Leeds, tells Mark Pappenheim about staging grand opera in a post-modern age

Has 'producer's opera' had its day? What with ex-enfant terrible Nicholas Hytner declaring, of his recent staging of Verdi's Force of Destiny, that he was now interested in 'staging the work itself, not the subtext', and the current reigning triumvirate at ENO bowing out partly because, the story goes, it was felt the Nineties demanded a different response to the repertoire from that delivered, in so highly personalised a fashion over recent years, by such 'post-modernist' directors as David Alden and Richard Jones, opera-with-attitude appears increasingly under attack.

It is significant, of course, that when the debate recently erupted in the pages of Opera magazine, it was in a heated public exchange between Elijah Moshinsky, director of Covent Garden's on-going Verdi series (and of the Stiffelio that opens there later this month), for the Conservatives, and David Pountney, ENO's outgoing director of productions (and producer of some of the most controversial re-thinkings in that company's own Verdi cycle), for the Conceptualists.

As the polarisation between Covent Garden and Coliseum suggests, the issue is as much one of simple economics as aesthetic attitude. It is no coincidence that the radical, conceptual school of opera staging, which first reached this country in the late Seventies via the work of the East German directors Harry Kupfer, Joachim Herz and Gotz Friedrich - and which was ultimately spawned, out of the Grotowskian theory of 'poor theatre', amid the poverty of Communist-run Poland - only really took off in Britain in the boom-bust years of Conservative-inspired cultural attrition. Does it never occur to those critics who constantly cavil about 'conceptual' productions that update the action from the Renaissance to the Fifties (or whenever) that off-the-peg suits from the flea market actually come a little cheaper than brocade and ruffs? Ask Moshinsky to stage his Verdi operas on the budgets available to the regional companies, rather than a Royal Opera subsidy, and even he might find himself cutting down on the velvet and lace. Yet the smaller regional opera companies that actually serve the vast majority of our non-metropolitan population rightly feel they have just as much right, and responsibility, to do the big epics as their big brother in the capital.

Opera North, for example, has cleverly evolved various strategies for presenting large works on a small budget. With Berlioz's The Trojans, the company cut costs by sharing the production with its regional counterparts in Scotland and Wales; with Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, it balanced the books (and satisfied the purists) by returning to the composer's original stream-lined conception, without the added Polish scenes. For its new staging of Verdi's Don Carlos, on the contrary, it has chosen to go with the composer's last thoughts rather than his first, opting for the four-act Milan revision of 1884 rather than the five-act version of the 1867 Paris premiere. In so doing, Opera North is running counter to the current authenticist orthodoxy (as evidenced by Claudio Abbado's DG recording and ENO's recent production) for opening up as many of the cuts as possible, even those the composer himself made before the first performance.

But then, as Tim Albery, director of the Opera North production, points out, the four-act version has an integrity all of its own: it was, after all, recomposed by Verdi himself with the benefit of a full 17 years' hindsight on the Paris premiere. The revision is also closer to the Schiller play on which the opera is based, and, like the play, begins and ends in Spain. As Albery observes, the first-act Fontainebleau scene was dreamt up by Verdi's French librettists as much to pad out the action - to fill out the full five acts demanded of a French 'Grand Opera' - as to provide vital background information to the fraught relationship between the three chief protagonists - King Philip II of Spain; Don Carlos, his son; and Elisabeth, the French king's daughter, who was first betrothed to the son before being married off to the father.

There is, Albery concedes, one obvious disadvantage to the four-act version - 'the fact that you get musical motifs that are meant to remind you of an act you never saw'. But then, there are also two huge compensations: 'One, it makes it all set in the same space, reinforcing that feeling of 'Here we are in Spain and there ain't no way out]' And, two, you get an incredible compactness to the piece: it's still a long evening, because there's a lot of music, but it seems to me to rocket along like a really compact thriller, a real little terrorist event.'

Albery, who won his epic spurs directing Opera North's Trojans, has reinforced that sense of claustrophobic compactness by siting Don Carlos's seven Spanish scenes in what is, in a sense, a single-piece set - 'in so far as it's all different and yet all the same - recognisably one world. If I showed you a picture of the first scene and a picture of the last, you might think they looked quite different - yet everything in the piece is contained in that first scene and you'd know by the end where it all came from.'

Restricting the action to the Spanish scenes of the Schiller original carries another obvious advantage for a cash-starved company like Opera North, cutting out the need for an extra Fontainebleau set and a fresh suit of clothes for the French court. It also cuts down on the chorus's contribution (and on costly chorus rehearsals). But then, as Albery says, 'People think of Don Carlos as a big chorus opera, but it isn't. In this version, the chorus appears first, as a small group of women, in the Veil Song scene; then there's the Auto-da-fe, which lasts a total of 12 or 15 minutes and, yes, you get some fantastic choral singing there, but then you get the revolution, which in this version lasts about two minutes, and that's it. It's actually a tiny opera about a few people - an intimate psychological drama rather than a top- heavy showbiz number.'

As with Aida, take away the Auto-da-fe (or the Triumphal March), and what you're left with is a chamber work, not a 'Grand Opera'. Like Aida, too, both The Trojans and Don Carlos are essentially simple stories: 'They're about the dynamics of relationships between a few people who hold power. And in both cases, it seems to me, by going to the heart of what they're about, you actually clarify the situation rather than obscure it - by not having hundreds of people parading about being extras, you can actually see what's going on.'

It also helps see what's going on, he observes, if not everyone in the cast is dressed, a la Velazquez, in uniform giant ruff and goatee beard. Even if that might be true to the work's historical context? 'But then, which context are we talking about? The historical context of Verdi? Or of Schiller? Or of 16th-century Spain? Or what?' It may be stating the obvious, but Verdi's opera isn't based on history, it's based on a play by Schiller - 'and Schiller, although he was a professor of history, would be the first to tell you that history was only useful to him as a vehicle for saying what it was he wanted to say.' And one of the things he wanted to say, through the character of the Marquis of Posa, Don Carlos's freedom-fighting friend and the King's sometime confidant, was something - entirely anachronistic in 16th-century terms but entirely timely for the 18th century - about the need to move from an absolutist to a constitutional monarchy.

'It's a clash between two centuries that we're seeing,' Albery observes, 'and that's really exciting. But it's got nothing to do with history and everything to do with theatre, as Schiller well knew.' And that's before you add in Verdi's own late 19th-century perspective and refract it all through to a modern audience via our communal experience of the past century or so.

From that point of view, Albery particularly relishes the opera's ambivalent portrayal of Posa's political idealism. 'Both Verdi and Schiller were mature, or cynical, enough, depending on how you look at it, to realise that characters like Posa can be more dangerous than helpful. It doesn't take away from the fact that Philip is a shameless autocrat and shouldn't be allowed - we're all agreed on that - but the debate is: how do we do it? Actually, how do we do it? And, my God, don't we see it now] Just look at all those countries in the East slamming it out from autocracy to democracy. It's a chaotic and terrifying process.' And if that isn't putting a work in its historical context, what is?

Opera North's new 'Don Carlos' opens in Leeds on Friday. See listings for details

(Photograph omitted)