The Guardian Profile: Richard Jones(posted 8035 days ago)Rise of the demon king
He played piano in bars and worked as a stage hand in variety shows but his real passion was for theatre. Now his uncompromising productions of operas and plays have earned him an international reputation - and the scorn of traditionalists. Charlotte Higgins reports on the director who brought scratch-and-sniff to Prokofiev
Charlotte Higgins Guardian
Saturday April 20, 2002
Bald-headed, stubble-chinned and with bent wire spectacles, director Richard Jones is propelling singers around a London rehearsal room. English National Opera is preparing for its landmark production of the season, Berg's Lulu. Today they are working on a complex scene towards the end of the opera. The best word to describe what Jones is doing is choreography: the intricate movement of the performers, right down to a hand making contact with a phone receiver, or a palm patting a bottom, is as neatly and uncompromisingly plotted as a dance. "You've got to be still now or an atomic bomb will go off," he tells the singers. "It is totally unnegotiable. It has to be absolutely tickety-boo. And Graeme - your bottom-patting is too perfunctory."
There is nothing anodyne about Richard Jones. His work, indeed his very personality, is unflinching, intense and often deeply witty. Over a 20-year career directing opera and theatre, he has been responsible for some of the stage's most talked-about images: latex- clad Rhinemaidens inflated to the proportions of Michelin men at the Royal Opera House; a tyrannosaurus rex towering over Ann Murray's Julius Caesar at the Staatsoper, Munich; a Ballo In Maschera in Bregenz in which a reclining skeleton, 32 metres high, clutched a vast open book that formed a stage floating on a lake. Jones is also the director who, memorably, brought scratch-and-sniff to the opera in his vision of Prokofiev's The Love For Three Oranges, first seen at Opera North in 1989. A deadpan, besuited announcer explained to the audience that the cards to be found on each seat in the theatre were to be rubbed at certain points in the opera to release appropriate smells. He was then shot by a chorus member and dragged behind the curtain.
This gift for the thrilling, the gaudy and the wayward is one of the characteristics that marks Jones out. "He is the best British director around at the moment," says director David Pountney, part of the "powerhouse" triumvirate that presided over English National Opera in the 1980s. "He is extremely imaginative, he has a very individual, quirky response to the material, and a very sharp eye for humour." According to Nicholas Hytner, artistic director-designate of the National Theatre: "He is one of the most genuinely original and completely individual directors around. I want him to do lots of shows at the National. Anything he's interested in." "He is indubitably top-notch," agrees ENO's general director, Nicholas Payne.
But just as Jones's work is often extreme and unpredictable, so is the critical response to it. There are shows - Three Oranges, his Pelléas And Mélisande of 1995 for Opera North, his 2000 Queen Of Spades for Welsh National Opera - that have been universally adored and acknowledged as classics. But things have not always run so smoothly. His Ring cycle for Covent Garden in the mid-90s was greeted with bemusement, even contempt: one paper called it "a monument of garish flippancy and banal cartoon caricature". The audience's catcalls on the first night of Das Rheingold made front-page news, and trouble behind the scenes was broadcast to the nation in the infamous TV documentary about the ROH, The House. "It was really quite memorable," Jones says, wryly, "to go on stage at Covent Garden, and be greeted not just with booing, but with a wall of sound. I suppose I didn't feel very much at the time. I was quite anaesthetised. Not with chemicals... alcohol."
His latest opening, this February, was a staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream - his Royal Shakespeare Company debut. A million miles away from the world of the pastel gauze and fairy glitter of convention, Jones's staging brought horror-film images, outsized flies and dirt-smeared, deranged fairies to conservative Stratford. The critics loathed it. One headline read: "Dream world ruined by this vandal's romp." Another observed: "Miserably undercast, grotesquely overdesigned, sloppily directed and lacks the following: theatricality, comedy and magic."
It was not a great time to be getting bad reviews. The production has been swept up in the current row about the future of the RSC and Adrian Noble's fitness to run it and is now generally known as the play that got the worst reviews of the RSC's entire history and of any theatre production for the past 20 years. Jones says: "It's quite extraordinary. I switched on Newsnight the other week and there was Jeremy Paxman waving copies of reviews at Noble. I watched it for a bit and then turned it off... I don't want to get involved. But I feel very happy to have directed it.
"I don't think it's the worst piece of theatre in Britain for the past 20 years. It's just not 'fairy glade'. A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Ring cycle will always be there tomorrow. All we are saying is, 'This is what we think of this play or opera tonight. We can do it differently another time.' There is an absolute obsession with being definitive in the theatre, which I hate. People think there is some kind of grail, that there is one way for a piece to be done. I think there is a cultural amnesia about what theatre is for. It should certainly ask more questions than it gives answers."
Richard Jones was born on June 7, 1953, in south London - down the road from his present home, an elegantly decorated terraced house in Kennington where he lives alone. His father worked for Shell; his mother ran the home. He has one elder sister. Ask Jones about his life and he is apt to provide a gloss: "I was a musician for a while, and then I became a theatre director." Reminiscences do not flow freely, and he baulks at discussing his childhood and schooling. His mother has watched one or two of his productions, but Jones cannot remember that his father has been to anything. "It's not as if he is saying, 'I refuse to see anything my erring son has directed.' This is just the way it has worked out," he says. David Sawer, a close friend whose opera From Morning To Midnight Jones staged last year for ENO, says: "He wasn't the sort of child who was given a toy theatre, put it that way."
Jones's first experience of the theatre was to be taken by his parents to a panto at the London Palladium, when he was aged about seven. "It was called Old King Cole. It had two people in very Wagnerian costumes who came out of trapdoors in puffs of smoke. I thought it was absolutely unbelievable, tumescent. Then when I was about 10 I saw Boris Christoff singing Boris Godunov at the Royal Opera. He was dressed in lots of fur; I thought that was deeply cool. I could draw you the sets for that production. It had St Basil's cathedral - all domes - and lots of people holding sticks topped with jewels. It was like Eisenstein. I thought it was amazing."
Jones was educated at a south London comprehensive. "I didn't like school. Frightened. This is going to sound horribly mawkish, but it is difficult if you are gay; it can be the most miserable time in your life. They can be disgusting, the years between 11 and 17." He learned the piano, discovering a keen aural sense and a talent for mimicry. "I was very dextrous but had absolutely no originality," he says.
His university career took him to Hull to study anthropology, after which he returned to London for postgraduate studies. "It was boring," he says, "but I didn't know what to do. What I really wanted was the theatre, but I thought other people did that, people like Peter Hall and Trevor Nunn. I was very embarrassed as a teenager by the theatre and I repressed my desire to do it for years. Instead I thought I would live on the periphery of that world." In the late 70s he started playing the piano in shows, restaurants and clubs - places such as the Ritz, L'Escargot and the Zanzibar. "I was earning about £50 a night, which then was phenomenal. And I blew it all on ridiculous clothes. Being a director was something I wanted to do so passionately that I didn't get on with it, or thought it was uncool to get on with it. I had a very nice partner, I was earning money, I thought life was rather good."
Then he began to work as a stage hand at the Victoria Palace theatre in central London. There was Swing-a-long-a Max with Max Bygraves, the Mike Yarwood Show, Carry On London. "It was the dying embers of variety, all these beaten up people performing to old ladies who are probably all dead now. I was dunking the fire sticks for the fire- eater, popping out for 20 B&H for women from the chorus line. I've never been happier in the theatre since. That world held an almost sexual excitement for me."
The experience provided a reconnection with the mythic, dingy, fantastical world that he had encountered as a small child watching panto and spectacular, creaky operas. He calls it a blood transfusion. You suspect it is closer to his heart, and much more significant to him, than any production directed by Peter Hall and his ilk.
It helped him wake up to what he wanted to do, and he started badgering directors to let him help out on operas and plays. In 1982 he was awarded an Arts Council bursary for trainee directors that took him to Scottish Opera. He assisted directors such as Pountney and Jonathan Miller. Finally, he was given his own production of Verdi's Macbeth ("a bit violent and exciting") for Opera-Go-Round, Scottish Opera's touring branch. After a few years at the coalface, he directed Ostrovsky's Too Clever By Half at the Old Vic in 1988, which won him an Olivier award.
A year later came The Love For Three Oranges. Nicholas Payne, who then ran Opera North, recalls: "There were lots of more famous people who were considered, but in the end we thought we'd give him a go. It was a surprise success for everyone, a piece from an unknown director that captured the public imagination. It's the production that made his name, but it's not his greatest one, nor one that he would want to be revived. It had a brilliant but surface theatricality. It was a firework. It was later that he acquired a greater depth and understanding of the human soul."
Productions at ENO followed, but, characteristically, he was soon to turn out what was regarded as a turkey - his 1991 Die Fledermaus, hated by the critics. Peter Jonas, who then ran ENO and now heads the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, calls it "the greatest production of that opera I have seen". Jones, who is fairly self-critical, calls it "terrible, and horrifyingly received". But he loved the atmosphere at that house: "It was one of those few times when you think, 'I'm working for a real opera company, something with an aesthetic, and the aesthetic is about ideas, and the ideas are disposable, and we think this about this piece today and we might have another idea about it tomorrow. I found it completely stultifying doing the Ring at Covent Garden, where there was this immensely stagnant notion that something should be definitive or achieved."
The Ring dominated Jones's professional life during the mid-1990s, and what overshadowed that experience was a disastrous relationship with conductor and Opera House music director Bernard Haitink. Jones's sometimes iconoclastic ideas had already confounded one potential partnership with an old-school conductor: in 1994 Sir Charles Mackerras took one look at the model for Jones's Munich Julius Caesar (in which tyrannosaurus rex literally loomed large) and refused to conduct it. "I think Charles Mackerras thinks I am the devil," says Jones.
"And he is rather unconventional in the music world in that he calls a spade a spade. But the point is it didn't end in acrimony - he was incredibly professional." The first night saw a bar rage of boos and catcalls. People were shouting, "Kinder, kinder! [children, children]". Then it became a succés de scandale, loved in Germany, less loved by the UK critics - "fatuous send-up" they called it.
It is clearly a production of which he remains very fond, along with a later Munich production of Tippett's "ecstatic, unwieldy" A Midsummer Marriage, which involved teaching an enormous German chorus to sing a rather odd text in English - the sort of faintly hilarious, paradoxical situation that Jones seems to warm to.
Things were infinitely darker during the Ring period, 1994-6. "I was set up with a conductor [Haitink] who was a nice bloke, but who wanted it to be a rather distant and dignified and gauzy stage event. Instead Nicholas Payne [then head of opera at Covent Garden] locked him in a room with a theatre artist. It was intolerable for him and it was intolerable for me, because he wasn't engaging in the stage imagery." Jones was working with designer Nigel Lowery, whose abstract concept for the tetralogy was almost universally damned. "I like modernism. To me Haitink had clearly never looked at a picture by Picasso. It was an evil and horrible working relationship. One person was talking one language and the other another."
Jones acknowledges that it was not the most successful directorial event of his career: "I think Siegfried was quite good and Rheingold was quite good. I didn't think Walküre was ever directorially cracked and Götterdämmerung was so bleak it was very punitive for the audience. It was messy, unfinished, had moments that were distinguished and moments that were not. I think you can only do that piece if you have a conductor and director who are on the same page." Payne suggests that, despite the trauma of the experience, there was something in Jones that relished the impossibility of the situation: "It was gladiatorial. You boldly go into the lion's den, into the Royal Opera House, working with extremely famous singers, and mould a work to your imagination."
Jones deeply resents the TV documentary series The House, that memorably saw Haitink's face drop a mile when presented with the models for the Ring. "I thought [the programmes] were complete shit. I suppose if they had been about another sphere of work I could have watched them more objectively, but they aroused in me lots of the contradictions and complexities and negative feelings I have about working in the theatre."
One hopes for happier times ahead: Jones returns to the ROH in 2004, to direct Shostakovich's epic Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk, with Antonio Pappano conducting. None the less, he retains some fairly trenchant views about aspects of that organisation. "I went to the National Portrait Gallery one day between meetings and saw an exhibition of photographs by Mario Testino. Mediocre pictures of people who are famous for being famous. By the end, I wanted to bomb it. I thought it was shit. The same photographer's work is what publicises the Royal Opera House - huge blown-up pictures outside t he theatre, in the newspaper ads. Girls with champagne glasses. And [singer] Willard White there, to add a dash of racial harmony - which of course you can't say. As long as you are promoting theatre that way you are doomed."
For the money, and to get away after the Ring nightmare, Jones decided to head to Broadway, to direct the musical Titanic. "I was also attracted by doing one of the most ironic stories of the 20th century in a format where you can't be ironic and you can't deal in unpalatable truths." It turned out to be a gruelling, if Tony- garnering, experience. At the first preview, the Titanic set failed to sink, which made international news.
"After each preview - there were weeks and weeks of them - we had meetings in this room above Times Square, which I called the arms- dealing room," says Jones. "There would be men sitting round a table and some unfortunate Filipino hovering in the background who would give you a drink. The producers' main problem was that we hadn't yet got a standing ovation - an SO they called it. I was at my wits' end. Eventually I said to my assistant director, 'What's the corniest thing you can think of?' He replied: 'I don't know... the dead meet the living?' I said, 'Right then, that's what we'll do'. Four nights later the dead met the living on stage and there was a standing ovation. And all these producers and writers were high-fiving in the theatre. I felt very weird about it."
Later the production went to Los Angeles. Jones says: "I had to watch a lot of previews and it was hideous, grotesque. Sometimes I used to slope out and a producer would tell me off. I would say, 'I am going to have to be hospitalised if I see this again'."
Punctuating the dark days of the Ring, however, came one of Jones's unalloyed successes - his Pelléas And Mélisande for Opera North in 1995. Paul Daniel was in the pit. "I remember rehearsing a particular scene that required great intimacy between two of the characters," Daniel says. "We were struggling with it, doing it in rather a reserved, distanced way. Then one day Richard came in and completely changed it: he allowed much more direct emotion into the scene. I remember him saying that he had allowed a door to open within himself that had been kept shut before. I think he used to use more schemes and ploys in his work than he does now. Over the years he has gradually allowed more and more of himself to be revealed on stage. The other thing that's really important about Richard is that he will know the score absolutely inside out."
People often accuse Jones of poking fun, of doling out cheap send-ups of operatic icons. That is to overlook his absolute obsession with, and knowledge of, music. He chats to his friend David Sawer most days, and when they aren't talking about sex, apparently, they are talking about "nerdy" music stuff. Jones goes to a lot of concerts, and finds the "hilariously nerdy" world of contemporary music benign.
Sawer points out that the way Jones deploys performers on the stage, in recurring but complex patterns, can be likened to the way a composer might deploy musical motifs. When Jones finds absurdity or monstrosity in plays and operas it is often assumed that he finds the art work itself laughable. But it is not really about that: it is about holding up these works unflinchingly to the light and bringing to the stage what he sees. If there are black jokes and absurdities, the joke is likely to be on us. He does not believe theatre to be redemptive or healing or a comfort. "We are told to take a huge, pulsating, ambiguous, inexplicable thing and render it coherent and linear and explicable. You can't do that and nor should you. It's Little Nell. That's why you get bored. That's why you think 'Oh god, I can't stand this.'"
Sometimes it is hard to see why Jones has chosen to be a theatre director, rather than, say, a visual artist. The fact that his stage work lacks the durability of a painting or a piece of music does bother him, he says. But he is not the sort of man to sit in a room on his own: his natural habitat is clearly that north London rehearsal room, cracking jokes with the singers. Soprano Joan Rodgers, who sang Mélisande in his Pelléas, calls him a "great enabler". But he says that he wouldn't want to run his own company; that he hasn't the charm and ability to schmooze that you need to run a theatre. Then he says, only half jokingly, "The only thing I would do is run the Royal Ballet - something that so clearly needs reinvention."
It will come as no surprise to his detractors that one of Jones's favourite opera productions of recent times has been last year's Don Giovanni directed by Calixto Bieito at ENO, branded by one critic "a coke-fuelled fellatio fest", and the focus, not unlike Jones's A Midsummer Night's Dream for the RSC, of a series of critical attacks on the artistic policy of the company. Says Jones: "Seeing it, I felt there was air going into my tyres for the first time in years. I thought, 'Oh yes, that's why I want to do this.'"
So why does he want to direct? "So I can see things that are in my head... about things I've read or heard. I'm often charged with being dishonest about what I have put on stage. But all I can say is they are things I have seen in my head. And I like the fact that the pictures you make are in three dimensions and there are live people in them who speak or sing."
And what, does he suppose, is theatre for? "It's about imagination. And about replicating human behaviour so you can organise it and study it. It is about images and dance and movement. It is sensual. It is magnificent. It is somewhere everyone can go to ask who we are and how we should be behaving better."
Does it work?
"No. Of course not."
· Lulu is at the Coliseum, London WC2, from May 1-30. Box office: 020- 7632 8300. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002