OPERA : A New Direction : Sir Peter Hall, master of theater and opera, returns with a back-to-basics revival of ‘The Magic Flute’--and an eye on Hollywood

Few people are so closely identified with contemporary British theater as Sir Peter Hall. Founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1960, then Laurence Olivier’s successor as head of the Royal National Theatre, the distinguished director in 1988 launched his own Peter Hall Company, a successful commercial producer on London’s West End and on Broadway.

As anyone knows who made it through the dense, 483-page “Peter Hall’s Diaries,” this is a man who can’t say no. From premiering the English-language version of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” when he was 24, through his Tony awards for “The Homecoming” and “Amadeus,” Hall seems to have missed few attractive opportunities.

That goes for opera as well as theater. Briefly director of productions at London’s Covent Garden opera house, and affiliated with England’s Glyndebourne Festival Opera for 20 years, he figures he’s directed nearly 50 operas all over the world. And a key stop for Hall in recent years has been the Los Angeles Music Center Opera, where his production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” opens Thursday for six performances at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

An admitted workaholic, Hall directed four plays and a five-hour TV series in 1991, another five plays last year. This year there are four plays, “The Magic Flute”--which will travel to Seattle and perhaps elsewhere--and the writing (with his wife, Nicki) of an eight-hour TV adaptation of “Sacred Hunger,” Barry Unsworth’s award-winning novel about 18th-Century slave trade. He gets up at dawn each morning to work on his autobiography.

Not that Hall is entirely work-oriented. There are three ex-wives (among them actress Leslie Caron and diva Maria Ewing), six children and three grandchildren; all of his children except baby Emma work in the entertainment industry, including 10-year-old Rebecca, his daughter with Ewing.

He is larger than life in person as well--a tall, imposing figure swathed in black from head to toe, from leather jacket to dramatic wool scarf. Jovial and seemingly eager to please, he maintains the same chatty, candid conversation one-on-one that got him into so much trouble on publication of his diaries in 1983.

Hall may be 62 now, but he’s hardly slowing down. Just two weeks before launching rehearsals here on “The Magic Flute,” Hall opened Peter Shaffer’s new play, “The Gift of the Gorgon,” for London’s Royal Shakespeare Company. Across town at the West End’s Globe Theatre, his revival of Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband” is a huge hit and may travel to Broadway next season.

The only dream not yet fully realized, he confesses, is moviemaking. And as he talks of meetings and agents and deals, it is clear that more than Mozart has brought him to town.

Question: Let’s talk first about “The Magic Flute.” You obviously enjoy rethinking the classics of Shakespeare or Wilde; what appeals to you about Mozart’s masterwork?

Answer: Above everything, “The Magic Flute” was conceived as a popular entertainment. In its day, it would have been what we call “the latest musical.” Mozart’s music is so extraordinarily complex and sublime that he’s made Schikaneder (the librettist) have bad press unwittingly.

I think the enemy of Mozart is the 19th Century, which really couldn’t cope with his ambiguity, realism or immorality. I think we have to go back to the original, take all the traditions away, take all the varnish off and try to look at it for what it is. And it seems to me that it is, No. 1, a popular piece inventing a fairy story, an allegory. As Lewis Carroll invented “Alice in Wonderland” and (Jonathan) Swift invented “Gulliver’s Travels,” Schikaneder and Mozart invented “The Magic Flute.”

The opera begins with a hero being chased by a terrifying snake--in a Jungian sense, he’s also being chased by his own desires, his own sensuality. Fairy tales are immediate and beautiful and frightening by turns. Like all good fairy stories, “The Magic Flute” has a hero and a heroine. And it has baddies and goodies. But being Mozart’s, the baddies are also good and the goodies are also bad. And this is what confused the 19th Century terribly much.

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Q: But you also objected strongly to director Peter Sellars’ approach to the opera a few years ago at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera.

A: That was really absurd because it cut all the dialogue. I have great admiration for Peter Sellars but it was so daft, it didn’t make any sense at all to me. It didn’t communicate as any kind of story. The architecture of the piece, that was very carefully judged--so much dialogue followed by so much music followed by so much dialogue--was of course completely destroyed.

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Q: How do you feel about it today?

A: I don’t think it matters that (people) do silly things like that if they want to because they’re not defacing “The Magic Flute” forever. They’re not drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa. But I think it is silly to treat masterpieces by talented people with such contempt, as if they didn’t know what they were doing. (It was) a happening based on “The Magic Flute.” It is much harder to do the piece as it is written than it is to cut all the dialogue and set it on the Los Angeles freeway.

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Q: And the Peter Hall interpretation?

A: I think if you examine the full text, it is perfectly clear that what (“The Magic Flute”) is actually about is that no man is complete without a woman and no woman is complete without a man. If you have a feminine-dominated society, you will be extremist, and if you have a male-dominated society, you will be extremist.

The piece has survived, obviously, because of Mozart, but it appeals on so many levels. If you look at it with a clear eye, it rings true every inch of the way. If you treat it with contempt and cut it to ribbons, you have that awful situation where they sing a sublime piece of music, then utter as quickly as possible a lump of cartoon dialogue and rush with desperation until they can cling onto the next lump of music.

Actually, just like a classic Broadway musical, the dialogue is very colloquial and very underwritten. When the characters start to feel something intensely, they break into song.

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Q: You’ve directed “The Magic Flute” just once before, in 1966 at Covent Garden. How did you resist going back to it for so long?

A: I’ve been busy (but) I’ve always felt I had another date with “The Magic Flute.” The one I did in the ‘60s didn’t work very well . . . (We) hadn’t quite understood the nature of Baroque magic theater and using the theater as metaphor where the gods live above, men walk on the stage and devils live underneath. “The Magic Flute” isn’t a Baroque opera, obviously, but it uses those stage conventions and tricks. People fly, appear by magic, disappear.

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Q: Chagall and Hockney, among others, have designed this opera in the past, and considerable attention is being paid to designer Gerald Scarfe’s fantastical vision in your production. Have you worked with Scarfe before?

A: Yes. I did a musical version of Ionesco’s “Rhinocerous” at Chichester Festival Theatre (in England), and Gerald designed that brilliantly. I think he has this extraordinary ability to create a whole world with different visual rules.

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Q: Do you approach theater and opera differently?

A: I don’t divide the way I work, partly because I’m a very musical director of plays, by which I mean I’m very concerned with tempo and rhythm and dynamics. I was trained as a musician, first a pianist, then a church organist. I can read the score.

I approach opera from the music, not from the words, because I think the music is finally what the communication is about, what the timing is about. I think the mistake some theater directors make is they go into opera and direct the libretto, not the music.

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Q: This is your fourth opera production for Los Angeles Opera. What keeps bringing you back here?

A: (Opera general director) Peter Hemmings, and the fact that I’ve been here before and know that you can do opera seriously here. You don’t knock that because many opera houses all over the world don’t give you the facilities or the conditions or the time to create anything worthwhile. So it’s impossible before you start.

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Q: Will we be seeing as much of you here in the future? You canceled “Elektra” when you were setting up the Peter Hall Company a few years ago, and now you’ve canceled the “La Boheme” you’d hoped to do here later this year.

A: I can’t come twice in a year. I have too much to do at home with my own company. (And) I had to cut down on my opera work because if you do two or three operas in a year, there’s not much time around the dates to do anything else.

One of the problems of opera--and it’s a good and bad thing--is that two or three years ahead you know you start on Dec. 28 and finish on Jan. 29, and it never shifts. You never go on tour, you never preview, you don’t do rewrites--all the things you do in the theater.

It’s in your schedule like a block of concrete. If something runs late, before you’re due to do the opera, you get in terrible trouble. I had to say I would do an opera every 15 or 18 months, but I hope to be back in Los Angeles as often as in the past.

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Q: What next?

A: There are a few operas I’d still love to do. I’ve never done any Puccini or Rossini, and I want to do both. I think in a couple years I’ll have a go at (Strauss’) “Rosenkavalier” in Berlin. The theater scene is very much my own company. I have a situation with the Royal Shakespeare Company to do a Shakespeare play every other year--I don’t like to be away from Shakespeare too long.

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Q: Is anything missing from this picture?

A: I’m terribly happy now. I’m superstitious saying it, but I have a really wonderful marriage, and I’m very romantic. I’ve always wanted to achieve this kind of complete sharing relationship with somebody, which from a man who’s been married four times sounds a bit pretentious. It seems to me marriage is the most wonderful thing in the world if it’s right and the most awful if it’s wrong. And it’s not to denigrate any of my other marriages, but Nicki is of my world, and yet has her own identity. . . . As she told her father, “the thing about Peter is he believes in marriage. He wants to get it right.”

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Q: And your professional life? Do you think you have it right as well now?

A: The great thing about my profession is that unlike lawyers, doctors and judges, I’m only as good as my last production. And it doesn’t matter what I’ve done. The fact that I’ve done a couple hundred plays, nearly 50 operas and 10 films--none of that counts. What matters is what you’ve just done.

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Q: Is that why you keep up this pace?

A: I wouldn’t know what else to do. I don’t understand what people mean when they say they want to have a period being fallow or they want to take a rest or recharge their batteries. I never have understood it. I would much sooner rehearse than have the day off.

I have the opportunity to spend five intensive weeks of my life inside the head of Mozart doing “The Magic Flute.” In this last year I’ve worked on three new plays--one with John Guare (“Four Baboons Adoring the Sun,” at New York’s Lincoln Center), one with Stephen Poliakoff (“Sienna Red”), one with Peter Shaffer (“The Gift of the Gorgon”). Going through the creative process with someone who’s creating something new is extraordinarily exciting. But I’ve also spent a considerable amount of my time inside “All’s Well That Ends Well” which is Shakespeare.

My definition of paradise would be eight weeks rehearsing a Mozart opera, a week off--that’s enough--and then eight weeks rehearsing a Shakespeare play. I’d like to spend the next six months directing a movie that I’ve written, then go back to Mozart again.

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Q: So you have two-thirds of paradise?

A: The area of myself that I have not stretched to the full yet and want to is the screen side. The 15 years I was at the National, I could not take six months off and go make a movie. I did opera videos, some of which I’m quite proud, and I did “Akenfield,” which I think has also been shown on educational channels over here, so I kind of kept my hand in a bit.

When I left the National (in 1988), I thought I must get behind a camera again. I’ve done practically everything in theater and opera that anyone could want, but I would love to make one or two films that are personal. I made “Akenfield” about where I grew up, and I think I have quite a lot to say for the camera.

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Q: Any possibilities coming up?

A: About 18 months ago, my wife and I were commissioned to write “Caruso’s Women,” a film about two sisters, both opera singers, who made Caruso what he was. They taught him to speak, sing, talk, walk and act--it’s like the Pygmalion story with the sexes reversed. He married one of the sisters, had an affair with the other, then jilted both of them after about 13 years by marrying a young New York socialite.

It’s actually kind of high-grade serious farce, because the way these three people disported themselves was even more extraordinary than the operas in which they appeared.

It will combine opera, theater, film and writing, and it’s very near to being financed now. So that’s the big bet.

I’m very greedy for work. I love work. I love being what I am. I hope I never have to take it easy.