The outsider shaking up opera

Opera Theatre Co's Annilese Miskimmon took a while to realise 'people like me can direct opera', she tells Michael Dervan

For Annilese Miskimmon, her new production of Monteverdi's Coronation of Poppea brings things full circle in a number of ways. Her crucial early encounter with opera came as a teenager, when she sang the role of Page in an Opera Northern Ireland production of Verdi's Rigoletto. It was a big thrill for a 15-year-old to appear on the stage of the Grand Opera House in Belfast, with the Ulster Orchestra under Kenneth Montgomery in the pit.

She remembers one singer in particular, Alan Ewing, as the assassin Sparafucile. "He had the package. He was dramatically extremely powerful. That's a brilliant part. He had a fantastic voice. And he was Northern Irish. He was someone who was doing something that I thought was exotic. But he was from Northern Ireland, and it was his work."

It's still his work, of course, and now it's hers, too. And the two of them are working together again on the new Monteverdi production, with Ewing taking the role of Seneca. Miskimmon describes herself as always having been "very bookish", so directing Shakespeare as an Eng Lit student at Cambridge came as no surprise. And given her positive experience of opera, she didn't flinch when she was asked to direct a newly re-edited version of Endimione by Johann Christian Bach.

That led to directing Alexander Goehr's Arianna, which had been premiered at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, "in a big, starry production". But Goehr had planned his work as "a re-imagination of what he thought Monteverdi's Arianna would have been like" - only a fragment of Monteverdi's opera, a famously haunting lament, has survived - and a production at the Senate House in Cambridge was "just about as near to what you would imagine Monteverdi using".

Now Miskimmon has finally made it back to Monteverdi, this time pure and simple, without the intervention of a composer from the late 20th century.

In spite of having begun to work in opera while still a student, she headed off in a different direction when she left college. "I went off and spent a miserable year studying arts management. I still hadn't quite got it into my head that people like me directed opera. The people I knew at Cambridge who thought they were going to do that for a profession were quite rich, male, public schoolboy, had connections."

She has nothing but praise for the course she took at City University in the Barbican, but she was clearly a misfit, with a far greater interest in the artistic end of things than in the nitty-gritty details of handling contracts.

It was after this that she got the call from Glyndebourne. It came about through Graham Vick, then the company's director of productions. "He had seemingly said in a meeting, this is legend, "Why am I only getting gay Oxbridge male directors to assist me? I would like a heterosexual female assistant.' " Someone from Glyndebourne had seen her work, been impressed, and tracked her down.

"I was extremely lucky because I worked with people like Graham Vick and Peter Hall, and with Peter Stein at Welsh National Opera - at a very early age in my development. I used to spend the summers at Glyndebourne, the winters at Welsh National Opera."

She describes herself as "quite a laid-back person", but says, "there's something about this particular art-form and the way it's done which just sets off this other side to my personality, which is very passionate, very adamant about quality and sincerity."

The passion is very broadly based. "I really feel that opera should be part of everybody's cultural experience. I've worked in North America, in companies where there's no public subsidy involved, and therefore no remit to reach out or connect or invite people in to this world. It really sickened me, to be perfectly honest. To me every taxpayer on this island and their families should have the opportunity to come and hear an opera twice a year. I want everybody to come and see if they like it and, if they do, come again. I feel a huge responsibility.

"I am this odd combination - Northern Irish girl, goes to Cambridge from state school, thrown into a weird world, and I feel the same in opera. There are very few female directors. I still feel a bit of an outsider in it all. It makes me very aware of my audience. That's why it's lovely to be someone who can work in other places - France, Italy, the United States, Canada, Norway - and who has quite an international view. But yet coming back to work in an Irish context is incredibly liberating for me, because I think outsiders can facilitate creativity very well. You have a very open mind."

She talks enthusiastically about work she has done with young people from troubled backgrounds, and how their encounters with opera have been liberating experiences. "I want to do a scheme which links opera and voting for young people. The reasons some young people wouldn't be seen dead going to an opera are also the kind of restrictions which make them feel that their vote's not worth anything either."

Her vision for Opera Theatre Company, whose core activity is touring small-scale productions, is that it will "get bigger and smaller". Poppea represents the bigger, a cast of 13 (most of them Irish), large by OTC standards, and the whole a joint venture with the Irish Baroque Orchestra. Getting bigger is also to be seen "in terms of being more courageous about artistic repertoire choices, and about the grey area between us and music theatre. There's no point in doing opera unless the theatre element in it drives the choices. I want to make OTC more of a link between classical music and theatre than it has been."

The smaller will be represented by a flexible production of Hansel and Gretel, designed to fit in anywhere, "which we're taking to every place we possibly can". She says she doesn't know of another artistic director "who has as much choice as I do. I don't have to do things in conventional theatres, so we're doing Fidelio in Kilmainham Gaol next year." And with low ticket prices and a wide geographical reach, she doesn't feel any unmanageable pressure to fill seats.

An Arts Council working group is looking into improving the provision for opera, an art-form woefully underfunded in Ireland. The major options being examined are an effective doubling of the funding shared between the major providers, OTC, Opera Ireland and the Wexford Festival (from €2.5 million to €4.6 million) or an almost quadrupling (to €9 million) that would begin to tackle the development of a national opera company.

"It's a really exciting time for opera in Ireland. It's fantastic to have an opportunity to engage with the Arts Council. For us, it's very simple. We want more money so we can do more performances in more places. You can talk all you like, but the realities of it are financial.

"As an opera-goer, even more than as an artistic director, it's good to talk about having a big national company, it's very good to talk about having an opera house in Dublin, but I'm not a great believer in 'if you build it they will come'. What I'm concerned about is that we develop our audience, so it's not the opera companies saying, we want an opera house or we want a national opera company, it's that the audience says we want it."

She takes heart when I point out that there have been extraordinary peaks in opera attendances. Back in 1991 Ireland had a bumper year for opera productions. At the time I counted 71 nights of full-scale opera, 43 nights of opera with a reduced orchestra or piano, eight nights of original chamber opera, and a concert performance of Balfe's Bohemian Girl.

Miskimmon points to the lack of the necessary research about audiences, though she sums up OTC's experience as being "if we do shows we can sell them". She worries about what she calls the council's "false argument," pointing out that "you could quadruple the resources and put it into separate companies, anyway" - the council's presentation of the options does rather seem geared toward enticing the existing companies to plump for the cheaper option, on the basis that they simply might not be funded under the more expensive one.

She worries, too - and probably most of all - about the possible centralising of artistic control in a single company. But as she talks, she's exactly as she describes herself, the opposite of laid-back - passionate, committed, the ideas almost tumbling over each other in the enthusiasm of their delivery.

OTC's Coronation of Poppea opens at The Helix, Dublin on Fri, Sept 9, and tours to Belfast, Galway and Derry (01-6794962)