Steven Pimlott: Melodrama - go on, you know you love it really

He directed 'Hamlet' for the RSC and 'La bohÿme' at the Coliseum. Steven Pimlott tells Brian Logan why Bollywood musical 'Bombay Dreams' is the perfect next move...

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Don Black: In the Bombay mix

Bombay Dreams: First night review

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Bombay Dreams online

A few years ago, a glut of articles in fashionable magazines told us that we were obsessed with Bollywood. Hindi movies were besieging the UK box office. The Royal Opera announced a Bollywood version of Puccini's Turandot. The theatre company Tamasha touredtheir delightful Fourteen Songs, Two Weddings and a Funeral. Now, eager for a hit after the failure of the Ben Elton-scripted The Beautiful Game, along lumbers Andrew Lloyd Webber to produce Bombay Dreams, a musical by Bollywood composer A R Rahman, which opens this week.

Steven Pimlott is the man charged with making a success of this multi-million pound concern. Until recently an associate director at the RSC, Pimlott, aged "nearly 50", has a pedigree in musical theatre, especially when children's entertainers are involved – he directed both Joseph, with Jason Donovan, and Dr Doolittle, with Philip Schofield.

It represents a considerable gamble for Pimlott and Lloyd Webber who are seeking to revitalise the flagging UK musical theatre scene. Rahman has never composed for the stage. Meera Syal has written a script from scratch, says Pimlott, "which is a very rare thing to happen". (The political situation in India is also casting a pall over the show's preview period).

But Rahman, says the director, "is a melodic genius, and I don't use the word 'genius' very often. In India, people say he's their Mozart, and it's sort of true." Pimlott accepted the commission from long-time Rahman fan Lloyd Webber because he was "enormously fascinated" to investigate the culture of Hindi cinema. And to work on a brand new stage show. "I've done plenty of revivals," he says. "But you have a chance to be involved creatively when you're in from the start."

He's at pains to point out that Bombay Dreams is no kitsch Bollywood pastiche. On the contrary, Pimlott is enthusiastic about what he calls the "full-bloodedness" of Indian movies. "These stories have no inhibitions about melodrama and about the use of song and dance, whereas the English tend to think 'isn't this a trifle over the top?'

"We think of melodrama pejoratively. I think that's our loss. I've been brought up directing opera and Shakespeare, so I don't find epic storytelling alien in any way."

It's not an association many would make. Classical theatre directors who stage musicals tend, in Britain at least, to be accused of dumbing down for a fast buck. When Pimlott simultaneously staged both Joseph at the London Palladium and La bohème at the Coliseum, one critic "couldn't understand that I wasn't slumming by doing Joseph, however much I tried to make clear that that was not the case. La bohème is not superior. I'm not interested in putting pieces of theatre into a hierarchy. My formative experiences when I was eight years old were seeing the movie of The King and I, and seeing Richard III at the RSC. At eight years old I didn't think that one was more valid than the other. I never have done."

His most recent dramatic successes have been alongside the actor Sam West, who played both Richard II and Hamlet under Pimlott at the RSC. Pimlott, who oversaw the RSC's new writing powerhouse The Other Place, quit the company amid the row that surrounded its traumatic, Adrian Noble-led overhaul, in which The Other Place, to Pimlott's chagrin, was closed.

"Adrian was absolutely right in challenging the structures of the company. But you could argue that he attacked, a bit like Adolf Hitler, on too many fronts." He bridles, though, at the resistance to change that greeted Noble's proposals. "I think all four of our national institutions – the RSC, the National, the Royal Opera and the Coliseum – are in a certain sort of crisis. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. People should constantly question what these institutions should be. The sad thing is the conservatism."

He thinks this springs from fear, but argues: "Why should we be so afraid? It's not like India and Pakistan here. I know the arts are very important – no man lives by bread alone. But it isn't life or death. Shakespeare's not going to go away. He's the man of the millennium, for God's sake."

The same phlegmatic attitude characterises his hopes for Bombay Dreams. "If it doesn't take off – well, I always think of The Marriage of Figaro, the greatest piece of music theatre ever written. When it opened, [the Austrian emperor] Joseph II went, 'don't like that very much', and that was that."

If Lloyd Webber's detractors balk at Pimlott's associations – Joseph and La bohème, Bombay Dreams and Mozart – they'd agree with his conclusion. "Success and quality," observes the director of Dr Doolittle, "don't always go hand in hand."

'Bombay Dreams': Apollo Victoria, London SW1 (0870 4000 650), Wednesday to 29 September