The Jones Boy.(Richard Jones, opera director, interview)(Interview)

MATT WOLF TALKS TO RICHARD JONES, THE FIREBRAND STAGE DIRECTOR WHO HASN'T WON ANY POPULARITY CONTESTS WITH BRITISH AUDIENCES

Like any director, Richard Jones savors his triumphs: his 1995 Pelleas and Melisande, for instance, which began at Opera North before traveling to London's English National Opera, where it became a 2001 Olivier Award nominee for best new opera production; or The Queen of Spades last fall for Welsh National Opera, which left commentators reaching for superlatives ("worth bartering the family silver to see," crowed The Independent), just as his 1998 WNO Hanseland Gretel had done.

Unlike many directors, Jones also finds something worth clinging to in what he terms his "train wrecks," whether they be a 1987 Carmen for Opera North or his first Die Walkure, at Scottish Opera in 1991, or a now-infamous 1991 ENO Die Fledermaus, in which Jones takes great and unabashed pride. (In the last, the audience was invited to wear masks during the ball.) "At least they're about ideas," says Jones, "and they fail or succeed, but at least they have some red blood in them." As the gleam in his shining eyes suggests (in another life, he might have made a great silent-movie actor), Jones regards blandness and bloodlessness as the real sins in theater. "Those are the times when I get rather crestfallen. I'd rather have the tingle or the train crash."

Jones has done as much to radicalize opera and theater production as anyone of his generation. He might prompt comparisons to the likes of Peter Sellars and Nikolaus Lehnhoff were he not considerably more mainstream. To some, Jones is simply an aging enfant terrible -- he's now forty-seven ("For God's sake don't write that") -- out to play the renegade card for all it's worth. Does he see himself as yet another willful bad boy of opera? "I think everyone gets five minutes like that, don't they?"

Interviews are hardly Jones's preferred way of spending time. "I'm very edgy in these things," he acknowledges, his tall, solid build leaning forward and back in a chair that barely accommodates it. He would rather talk off the record on various subjects than in any way dissemble. More irreverent, even, than Sellars, less somber (and more eclectic in his choice of projects) than Lehnhoff, Jones speaks openly, even gleefully, of embracing the vulgar as well as the high-minded when appropriate. In Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, for instance, the narrator is eliminated once he has fulfilled his function in the show; in Jones's 1990 West End production, he cruelly -- and hilariously-- dispensed with the character (played by Nicholas Parsons) by sending a dummy of the performer plummeting from the flies.

This spring at ENO (April 27-May 12), Jones stages the world premiere of From Morning to Midnight, the first full-scale opera by one of his closest friends, David Sawer, adapted from the 1916 play by German Expressionist Georg Kaiser; the designer is Jones's frequent colleague, Stewart Laing, who won a Tony Award for Titanic. Some three years in preparation, the opera relates a darkly defining day in the life of a bank cashier who ends up robbing his own bank. Think something Berg-like, and you're on the right track, agrees Jones, who also has an ENO Lulu on tap: "It's got that kind of canvas, that kind of sweep."

We meet during his Young Vic rehearsals for the first London revival in more than a decade of Pirandello's seminal 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author--renamed, in David Harrower's translation, Six Characters Looking for an Author. And a harrowing event it turns out to be: this benchmark anti-illusionist text breaks down the relationship between spectator and spectacle and constantly upends expectation. So does Jones's work. That explains the furor induced by his 1994 Royal Opera House Ring, in which, among other things, the director demanded that his performers bone up on the Theater of the Absurd. Their research was augmented by abstract and colorful Picasso-influenced designs -- a Ring begun in Arcadia -- and such directorial flourishes as "naked" Rhinemaidens dressed in see-through rubber, prompting catcalls from the Bayreuth brigade. (Jones has attended the Bayreuth Festival twice and calls it "a very oppressive experience.")