THEATRE / Messing about on the ocean wave: When the singer Gillian Humphreys found her career all at sea she decided to take the plunge. Mark Pappenheim reports

GILLIAN HUMPHREYS well recalls what her teacher, Eva Turner, used to say in her Royal Academy student days: 'Put blinkers on, she'd say, and you're a star.' Fine advice if, like Dame Eva, you have the voice and the determination to turn yourself into the world's greatest Turandot. But not everyone is capable of such tunnel vision - 'and anyway,' Humphreys reflects, 'when you're a starving young singer, you just have to accept whatever's going'.

So, although she soon chalked up a Cherubino for Welsh National Opera and a Papagena on the very first Glyndebourne tour, 25 years on Humphreys is more often to be found on the air than on the operatic stage - either there, or at sea.

For, as well as making regular guest appearances on Friday Night Is Music Night and presenting her own Radio 2 series Gillian Humphreys Sings and The Musical World of Gillian Humphreys, this former principal soprano with D'Oyly Carte and star of West End musicals from The Dancing Years to The King and I, has found a novel way of combining her three great loves - 'music, people and travel' - as a purveyor of popular programmes of opera, operetta, Gilbert & Sullivan and traditional Victorian music hall on luxury cruises.

It's one thing knowing your audience, it's quite another being shut up with them on a round-the-world tour. As Dr Johnson observed, given a choice between a sea voyage and a jail sentence, most rational beings would choose the latter - not only is there less risk of drowning, but 'a man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company'.

Times have changed, and the new generation of Royal Viking and Cunard cruisers on which Humphreys and her Concordia Theatre Company appear are not so much floating prisons as seagoing hotels, complete with on-ship casinos, libraries, theatres and shopping arcades, plus a full complement of swimming pools, jacuzzis, saunas, fitness centres and a range of sports facilities from golf and basketball to trap shooting and croquet. The food is haute cuisine. And as for the company - and the QE2 carries around 1,700 paying passengers and 900 staff - Humphreys has encountered all sorts, from academics to the ex-gardener of a Cambridge college, from retired couples spending their life savings on the cruise of a lifetime to the wealthy widow who literally lives on board one boat, spending her sunset years on her own floating retirement home. But, as Humphreys observes, once out at sea, she and her fellow performers become just another part of the customer service, along with the stewards, waiters and cabin and deck crew.

When it comes to assembling these cruising concert parties of hers, compatibility and versatility are the key. Not only does any group need to get on well together in close confinement, it also needs to be able to capture and sustain an audience's interest not just for a single concert but for a whole crossing, and in the face of all sorts of rival attractions. (As she says, you can often see people visibly asking themselves, 'Shall we stay or shall we go and play bridge?') So she demands a lot from her artists: they need to be not just good musicians, but genuinely good companions; they need to have a solo show of their own, plus a special subject to offer as part of every cruise's programme of 'enrichment lectures'; they need to be good in a crisis; and, above all, they need to be good sailors.

Humphreys discovered her own patent cure for transatlantic tummy on her maiden voyage. 'It was my first and only bout of seasickness,' she recalls. 'I had it so bad that the ship's doctor gave me an injection that knocked me out for two days, and someone else had to go on in my place. But when I heard that she was going down very well, I was on again like a flash, I can tell you, and I've never been seasick since.'

As for repertoire, it's pretty well up to her, although she does get the occasional directive from head office - 'to include 'Nessun dorma', for example'. She also gets plenty of on-board requests, ranging from the simple - a favourite bit of G&S - to the obscure-but-manageable - 'lots of requests for unlikely German Lieder' - to the utterly impossible - 'I mean, the Grand March from Aida with a company of seven and a piano?'

That said, she remains convinced that you can do anything anywhere, artistically, provided you package it the right way. 'When I wanted to include some verse readings in my Radio 2 series, Glory of the Garden, they all said, 'You can't put poetry on Radio 2.' But the response from listeners was tremendous. You see, you're not alone - in everything you do, there's always someone out there who shares your enthusiasms.'

She has two party pieces in her current repertoire: Shakespeare and Love, a programme of prose, verse and songs which she premiered last year, with the actor Edward de Souza, at a Shakespeare Birthday concert in Southwark and has since toured widely on the festival circuit (and recorded for Pearl); and Home, Sweet Home, a musical portrait of Adelina Patti, the great 19th-century Italian soprano. The highest paid singer of her day, Patti was the prototype of today's international operatic jetsetters and, says Humphreys, 'the Madonna of her age'. But she eventually retired to Wales, living out her last days at Craig-y-Nos Castle near Brecon.

For Humphreys, who was born in Pontypridd, just 25 miles down the valley, Patti has become something of a passion. There's not just her one-woman show: in May she gave a lecture on the singer's life at the National Portrait Gallery; in December she will present an hour-long tribute to her art on Radio 2; and next year she will finally realise her dream of taking a cruise party up the Amazon to Fitzcarraldo's famous opera house in Manaos, where once Patti appeared to the rapture of the local rubber-barons. So much for the homely Victorian values of her oft-sung signature-tune - Home, Sweet Home. Humphreys clearly shares Patti's globe-trotting impulses. As she says, 'When I look at a place on a map, I just think, 'How can I get there?' ' And the best way, she's found, is to persuade a shipping line to lay on a cruise to take her.

Yet, as she is keen to stress, leading the high life on the high seas is only one of the 'two worlds' that she inhabits. The other is made up of the many young people's and charity concerts that she organises on dry land under the auspices of her Concordia Musicale foundation. She has recently expanded her activities into Romania, where she was originally invited last summer to give her Shakespeare and Love programme at the Silvestri Festival. 'But I said I'd only do it if I could also do my children's concerts in their orphanages.' She not only received the personal endorsement of Mother Teresa for her work in Romania and in setting up a London exhibition of the Romanian children's art work but was subsequently invited back last October as guest of honour for the opening of the Shakespeare Kingdom House Foundation, a bizarrely bardolatrous project to create a replica Globe Theatre and Shakespearian study centre within the late President Ceausescu's old hunting lodge in Transylvania. She intends to return to the orphanages this autumn.

These Romanian adventures form the substance of a lecture, 'Building Bridges Through Music and the Arts: A journey from Hollywood to Mother Teresa's Orphanages in Romania', with which she currently regales the guests on round-the-world cruises. 'People ask me how on earth I can give such a lecture in such luxurious surroundings? But when we go to Romania, we don't pretend to be poverty-stricken or to be embarrassed about our riches - we go taking the best of the West with us and we embrace the best of whatever they've got when we get there. For myself, I want these extremes - I want to be able to see the whole picture.' And you certainly can't see so well if you're wearing blinkers.

(Photograph omitted)