The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 59

59 ii III OBSERVER SUNDAY 24 NOVEMBER 1991 Rushing in where divas fear to tread Rupert Christiansen talks to soprano Lesley Garrett, who even sings the praises of coffee while waiting for Mimi and Violetta. recorded. The motives for taking on voice-over work for Ragu pasta sauce and Kenco coffee ads are more nakedly commercial 1 the fees subsidise the lousy money I make at the Back within the conventional boundaries of operatic good taste, she feels she has reached the stage when she could expand her repertoire into more exalted regions. 'I'd love to do Mimi in Boheme and Violetta in Traviata: I've never had a chance to die properly on Whether her light, pretty, but relatively monochromatic soprano is quite up to these roles yet must be open to doubt. Her regular repetiteur at the ENO, Phillip Thomas, thinks that 'she has a very adaptable voice, which projects amazingly well, and she is constantly striving to find the right sound for the character.

But I don't think it has developed as far as the dramatic ability. She has a few hoops to jump through before she sings Violetta and I hope she doesn't stray too far from her classical The fact that she's already weathered some dodgy vocal spells would make other singers more cautious than she is temperamentally inclined to be the first aria she sang as a student at the RAM was Verdi's epic 'pace, pace, mio dio', which she found 'a doddle, as long as you didn't think about it'; her teacher subsequently advised her to consult a psychiatrist about her hyperactivity. But she genuinely can't stop herself. Riding as high professionally as she is personally (sorry chaps, she married a 'gorgeous' London GP last year), fearless, irrepressible, and a thumping good-time girl, Lesley Garrett rushes in where the divas fear to tread. 'Die Fledermaus' opens at the London Coliseum on 2 December with a Royal Gala in association with the RA Pop Art exhibition.

IT COMES as no surprise to learn that Madonna and Michael Jackson are Lesley Garrett's role models. In fact, she is so bubbling over with the spirit of showbiz, so gutsy and sexy and sunshine -bright, that it is rather more difficult to register her reputation as a respectable well, fairly respectable opera singer. You might think that in person she would prove just a bit much. Fortunately, the more you talk to this little ball of soprano fire, the more you realise that its bounce is weighted with the solid and gritty qualities of her native Yorkshire. At the moment, she is proving herself the sterling trouper.

Despite a cracked sternum and broken rib the effects of a bad car accident which makes breathing painful, she is furiously rehearsing for her debut as the maid Adele in Richard Jones's new production for English National Opera of Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus. Responding to the weirder and wackier of Jones's inspirations is certainly more exhilarating than obeying doctor's orders. 'Richard throws more ideas at you in a day than most producers do in a she says. 'It's like trying to thread your way through some chaotic children's nursery. Sometimes you're playing at Walt Disney, sometimes it's Thirties screwball comedy, sometimes it's back to operetta and the reality of the original period.

You have no idea what world he's going to open up next, yet all the time he's being very precise about what he wants you to do, so I'm totally This is a lie: Lesley Garrett is one of those people who is never exhausted, and she admits that the thought of gently resting her bones at home is a worse nightmare than anything that Richard Jones at his craziest could dream up. She 'desperately' wanted to play Adele, though like sole responsibility or being the centre of Another lie, I fear: Lesley Garrett is about as publicity-shy as a charging rhinoceros and whenever she has been pushed into the spotlight, as everything from Yum-Yum in The Mikado through Susanna and Zerlina to Janacek's Cunning Little Vixen, she has coped with the prominence remarkably well. Seven years a Coliseum girl, she will be happy to be one for seven years more, and hopes that the regime which will replace the triumvirate of Peter Jonas, Mark Elder and David Pount-ney in 1993 won't implement radical changes in policy. 'But there are some issues which I think need to be addressed. The first is whether the advent of surtitles should change our commitment to singing everything in English.

Second, I don't believe opera is working well on television, and third, we ought to be getting out and about more not just to the regions, but into schools and factories as This evangelical streak is a strong one, and she has little patience with the 'snotty' (a favourite Garrett adjective) view that the crusade to popularise opera may have gone far enough. The product of a working-class home that belted Verdi and Puccini pops out round the piano, she grew up thinking that such music was perfectly normal and can't quite accept that other people just don't. Her lack of inhibition on this score has led her on to the Bruce Forsyth show and Saturday morning children's television; next year she hopes to hit the West End in a musical adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which she has already at heart: Lesley Garrett as an ambitious Adele in 'Die Fledermaus', Photograph by Richard Mildenhall. A smart operator happiest in others' company Nicholas Hytner, director of Alan Bennett's new play, The Madness of George III, gallops through his career and dinner with Michael Coveney. it's hard to see why: isn't she a rather irritating character, I ask, just a pipsqueak Viennese maid, waving a feather duster about as she hits the soubrette top note? Lesley Garrett demurs.

'I've thought of some real motivation for her. Adele wants to be taken seriously as an actress. She's got her eye on the main chance: if there's a crack in the door to fame, she's going to charge at it. When she sneaks in to Orlof-sky's smart party, she's absolutely gobsmacked. She's read about such goings-on in Hello! magazine and planned to get there all her life.

It's a thrilling step forward for her. A very ambitious and determined girl, you see, with a touch of Lucille Ball; I like Except for the starry-eyed-ness, this personage seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to 36-year-old, Doncaster-born Lesley Garrett. 'I suppose you have to put a lot of yourself into whatever you're she says, 'but I don't know that I've ever considered myself as ambitious. It's all the impulse of the moment, I don't plan the long term very much. But I don't think I could handle one of those big international careers: I'm a home-loving Coliseum girl at heart.

Even though it's falling to bits and there's no room and it stinks of drains and rotting corpses, I owe so much to the She joined the ENO in 1984, after a stint at the Royal Academy of Music, and remains one of its backbone ensemble of 19 salaried principals, obliged to give the Coliseum first call on their time. 'Being part of a team is for me the essential joy of any sort of she comments. 'I don't actually relationship on The Wind in the Willows, currently revived for a Christmas season. 'Because the new play is only about the madness of George III, it's about everything. There is no secret agenda, so it reverberates far more widely than do plays which set out to exploit historical fact in order to produce some sort of political or philosophical Phew, what a relief.

Hytner has been spouting for 10 minutes and has simultaneously cleared his plate. I am still sitting behind half a ton of noodles. He smiles seraphically from his conspicuously emDty side of the table and explains why he rarely does new plays by young authors who require nurturing. 'I need to sniff the chance of anything I do becoming a monster He likes big plays, big theatres, big actors. Audiences, he feels, should get their teeth into something.

New music in opera does not always offer much to bite on. 'Composers are so unworldly that, when I've done contemporary music, it's taken me the six-week rehearsal period to understand it. I've got to the stage now where I simply prefer Is he therefore fed up with opera? He nearly said as much on television earlier this year, and elaborated in Opera magazine, suggesting that style eIdo two or three shows ay ear in order not to have time to dwell on what was wrong with the last one. 3 was winning out over content at the English National Opera. His own ENO productions of Handel's Xerxes (returning to the Coliseum in January) and The Magic Flute were certainly stylish.

I cannot readily think of two more richly enjoyable London theatre nights in the past few years. 'In interviews I just shoot my mouth off and then get very depressed. But every time I do an opera now, I think that's it. One of the reasons I do two or three shows a year is in order not to have time to dwell on what was wrong with the last So: he does have more opera plans, starting with Verdi's The Force of Destiny for the the subsidised companies, and at Glyndebourne. But I'm especially happy at the National.

And if they are rightly serious about the twentieth-century American drama of Tennessee Williams and O'Neill, it is surely correct for them to be equally serious about one of the three (We are at our best in the British theatre when we find a way of reconciling art and showbiz-3 or four indisputably great twentieth-century American As I wrestle with a large prawn, Hytner has been ready for dessert for a couple of hours. He says he won't have one, but I would hardly have had time to notice it if he had. We finish instead with a few ENO next year. 'I suppose I just want to do great operas, with great singers and conductors. I loved working with David Atherton, Roger Norrington and Charles Mackerras.

And I'd like very much to work with Abbado and Sir Colin I am dismayed to learn that his heart was not in the wonderful Glyndebourne La Cle-menza di Tito this summer. That commission came in a phase of enthusiasm for Han-delian opera seria Xerxes, and Julius Caesar in Paris that had evaporated by the time he came to the Mozart. He turned down the offer of succeeding Peter Hall at Glyndebourne because he is too restless and impatient to want to run anything. Not even the RSC or the National? 'No, there's too much What about the regional theatres? 'There's no money to run the Bristol Old Vic, everyone knows Might not the money follow you there? 'I doubt it. The damage has been done now in the political and economic But was not the damage also done by the Hytner generation turning its back on the regions? 'That's a just criticism.

I never applied for any of those jobs for purely selfish reasons. I only want to do what I really want to do. I'd be hopeless. I like the power over my work, but having power over other people's destiny I've always found the harder aspect of a director's Hytner made his name because of other people's commitment to regional theatre: his first major work after gorgeous post-modern visual dimension to the way we now view poetic tragedy. He is surrounded by a permanent floating list of colleagues who are also, he says, his social life: designers David Fielding, Mark Thompson and Bob Crowley, actors Alex Jennings, Michael Grandage, Duncan Bell and Desmond Barrit, the constant composer and translator Jeremy Sams, and lighting designers Paul Pyant and Mark Henderson.

This emphatic chappiness, which also runs like a thin satirical vein through the Bennett adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, exposes the one major flaw I sometimes detect in his work: unlike Nunn, he's not quite so good at the casting and directing of women. Next year he returns to the the National to direct Carousel and one other show, to be announced. 'I have been lucky in finding myself among people I like working with in all 1 words about craft. 'Many directors are better at creating an illusion of emotional depth than at actually delivering a play in such a way as to communicate that whole play, in the best way, to the largest number of people. I think that's very I did, too, and marvelled at the way in which he proceeded to winkle his car, very quickly, out of a tight parking spot.

He sped off into the Hampstead night. I was still listening to a speech suspended in the exhaust fumes. 'I'm not really into leisure. I've got a nice house and this Peugeot with power steering and I get a lot of taxis. Everyone should have one big West End and international hit, though 'Miss Saigon is not going to be Les Miserables.lt's extremely nice, but it's not millions, it's not what people think.

It's just very, very A 1 1 important and VVli- I'rlitlfitliill average living more. n.nlr- I 'I'll i.j actors, 14 v.m Itili. fr Just a home-loving Coliseum girl Cambridge was seen on tour with the now defunct Kent Opera 'The best opera production I ever did was their King Priam' and in Exeter, Leeds and Manchester. At the Royal Exchange in his home city, where he was an associate in the mid-1980s alongside Ian McDiarmid, he delivered unforgettable, sensual and the real Hytner hallmark perfectly organised and brilliantly paced versions of As You Like It, Marlowe's Edward II, Wycherley's The Country Wife and Schiller's Don Carlos. The success of Miss Saigon led to charges of 'selling out', but Hytner is proud of it and keener as a result to have a crack at Puccini.

He is dying to do La Boheme. 'We are at our best in the British theatre when we find a way of reconciling art and showbiz. I wanted to work in the theatre because of the RSC's work at the end of the 1960s and in the early I Seventies, when they created, under Trevor Nunn, an intellectually watertight showbiz style, showbiz with emotional Thus Hytner distances himself from the great European socialist, humanist and 'serious' theatre tradition: 'There is in our temperament, as artists and audiences, a sensible resistance to unstructured European self-indulgence in the No one who directed, so well and so joyously, that old pot-boiler The Scarlet Pimpernel could possibly be accused of selling out in Miss Saigon. He's an unrepentant pleasure-spreader and, like Nunn, brings the same hedonistic imperatives to Shakespeare as he does to Mozart and melodrama. His RSC debut in 1984, Measure For Measure with Josette Simon as Isabella, conveyed the full luxuriant blast of financial and moral collapse in inter-war Europe, just as a new age of great exhibitions and grand tours was implied in the neo-classical splendours of the ENO Xerxes.

Hytner's subsequent RSC collaborations with the quirkily brilliant John Wood as Prospero and King Lear have added a special brand of humour and a scrupulously "WE WANT TO FIT THE WORLD INTO OUR 'IN THE end, all I do is direct shows. And I don't think directors are first-degree creative Surprisingly, Nicholas Hytner, at 35 the most distinguished and distinctive theatre and opera director of his generation, takes a casual and throwaway line on his profession. It is difficult to tell whether Hytner is unduly modest or just impatient with the idea of being interviewed. His slight, boyish frame is tense and brittle at the dinner table of a Chinese restaurant in Hampstead. He gobbles as fast as he gabbles.

I assume that he stays rake-thin because his food, which slips away without being chewed, translates into pure energy in a spasm of digestive osmosis. He is of average height, quick, mercurial, short-haired and dressed with a quietly pronounced and tie-less modishness. Who is his favourite playwright? 'Alan Bennett, because I'm directing his new play at the That play, The Madness of George III, which Hytner says is about the madness of George III, was popped: through his letter box in April by Bennett, with the characteristic proviso that the author did not know if it was any good. Hytner thinks it is reasonably all right, and his production opens at the Royal National Theatre on Thursday. A child of the self-help 1980s, Hytner's flight to the top has been arrow-swift.

Born into a comfortably-off Mancunian Jewish family, he is probably the only person whose parents (now divorced) are both in Debrett's People of Today. Benet Hytner is a prominent Manchester QC, and Joyce Hytner, an inveterate first-nighter and number one fan, the public relations manager of Granada Television. Nicholas, the eldest of three sons, attended Manchester Grammar School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he read English and made his name as the new Trevor Nunn in a generation that also included Declan Donnellan, Steven Pimlott and Jeremy Sams, all of whom remain close friends. He lives in Primrose Hill in a large house bought from his earnings on the West End and Broadway productions of Miss Saigon. Alan Bennett lives round the corner in Camden Town.

They forged a working TTTTAin We want to be able to bring you passionate drama from around the globe. This year we performed 16 premieres from five continents in a space just 18ft by 15ft. (No bigger than the room.) Next year we want to do This year we worked with 182 directors. 12 designers and 43 stage managers. Next year we want to work with more.

This year we were only able to pay an average weekly wage of under a pound. Next year we want to pay more. This year we performed to over 14,000 people. Next year we want to perform to many more. STEPHEN DALORY, THE GATE THEATRE Pleasure-spreader: Nicholas Hytner.

Photograph by NeilLibbert..