Theatre: In a world of his own

Robert Jones leapt at the chance to direct Holy Mothers. The play's refusal to conform to the trend for feel-good theatre appealed to him. So you'll either love it or hate it. By David Benedict

The ruthless precision of the German language probably precludes an equivalent for "a case of egg on face" but if anyone were going to invent such a phrase - or, indeed, something more graphic and far funnier - it would have been the late playwright Werner Schwab.

Successful writers have a habit of saving and savouring early rejection slips. The following bizarrely literal summary is the ludicrously shortsighted response of the dramaturg for an Austrian theatre to Schwab's now notorious play Die Prasidentinnen: "Three women talking in a grubby kitchen... dialogue about individual and family problems in a lower-middle-class milieu shot through with notably obscene fantasy... a lot feels involuntarily funny. A surreal farce which ends in chaos. Not stageable." Oh, really?

A little over two years later, after its Vienna premiere in 1990 caused a scandal, that same play had been seen in theatres across Europe. Its 36th production - now named Holy Mothers in a vibrant English version by the playwright Meredith Oakes - will open the exciting new season at the transformed New Ambassadors theatre. Until recently, this venue has been the successful, temporary West End home of the Royal Court, under whose aegis the play was first seen in this country at a public reading last year.

Cut to last Christmas in Los Angeles. Having just opened a captivating production of Hansel and Gretel for Welsh National Opera in Cardiff, the director Richard Jones has just flown in - you need an up-to-date passport to keep track of this man - to rehearse the LA production of his Broadway blockbuster musical Titanic. In the throes of all that, he receives a phone call. Would he like to do Holy Mothers?

Given the dramatic breadth and depth of Jones's work - everything from the alarmingly funny Feydeau farce A Flea in Her Ear at the Old Vic to the recent Ring Cycle at Covent Garden, via Lesley Garrett's flash of nudity in Die Fledermaus at ENO - not to mention his uproarious staging of Prokofiev's The Love of Three Oranges, complete with scratch'n'sniff cards - it's hardly surprising he leapt at the chance.

Jones has long been in a position to pick and choose, which takes him everywhere from theatres to opera houses in both Europe and America. In August, Glyndebourne will revive his meticulous production of Jonathan Dove and April de Angelis's extraordinarily engaging Flight and this autumn his Opera North staging of Pelleas and Melisande arrives at ENO. Thus he has no need to affect interest in lukewarm projects.

"I think it's fantastic. It's modern in the sense that it's not redemptive." This is something of a central tenet with Jones. The redemptive, "feel- good" factor is seemingly the condition to which all art (especially film and television) currently aspires. Theatre is by no means immune to this but Jones remains deeply suspicious. "I'm fairly disinclined towards things that are tacitly or subliminally feel-good. A lot of modern theatre tends to be so in a slightly underhand way. But this isn't." No one in their right mind would describe Schwab's play as lighthearted, but his extraordinary theatrical vocabulary is so astonishingly and magnificently unexpected that you find yourself convulsed with laughter at the most unlikely things. When you stop to consider the thought behind it all, wider political concerns come charging across, but they are never explicitly or sanctimoniously expressed.

Theatregoers, understandably, want to know what a play is "like", but Holy Mothers is only like itself, the result of an original, fiercely comic imagination. Sticking with his "non-redemptive" perspective, Jones sees it as being about a world with no moral stamina. "That seems fairly apposite to me. This group of people will do or say anything to reiterate their truths." He also identifies it as being quite "panicky", a particularly exciting state for a piece of live theatre, and one glance at the script is enough to tell you that these hilariously foul-mouthed, grotesque women definitely won't have a future life in a TV sitcom spin-off.

As for his own future, it's already partially mapped out. He returns to Broadway at the end of the year with a new play by David Hirson. (He did Hirson's La Bete both there and at the Lyric Hammersmith a few years back, encouraging a virtuoso performance from Alan Cumming in the process). Then he's off to Berlin to do a Shakespeare and he's planning opera productions of The Queen of Spades, The Trojans, and Lulu.

The dynamic hallmark of his direction stems from the fact that he makes no distinction between theatre and opera. His major influences have been painting and music and, unlike many opera directors who have no practical knowledge of the form, Jones worked as a musician in theatre before taking up directing. His approach remains identical, except that in opera, "you have to really sniff out the circumstances with the actors. It's happened to me once or twice, and I would have been a fool if I hadn't learnt from the experiences, but only very occasionally have singers said `I don't go there'."

Typically - he's a lanky, shy man whose awkwardly self-effacing body language is more than a little embarrassed - he deflects praise on to his collaborators, enthusing over his working relationships with conductors such as Vladimir Yurofsky - "an amazing intellect" - and David Parry - "a fantastic conductor and collaborator" - or praising the commitment of his casts, especially in such well-acted work as his Hansel and Gretel and The Ring.

The last of these is particularly interesting for what it says about his own view of his directorial style. "People look at the work and assume I am didactic. I don't think I am. It's about me saying, `Look this is what is going on in my head about the piece. It may not be what's going on in yours, so let's have a look at it'. There was a philosophical world of absurdist theatre to The Ring, but a lot of what happened on stage came not from me but the singers. I had pounds 100,000 per production.

"You don't need huge amounts of money but, in opera terms, that's Mickey Mouse money, so that did determine the aesthetic, and it was presented in a sort of Beckettian style. But then, I'm more interested in ideas than scenery."

Paradoxically, it was his work with designers that gave him his big break, at the Old Vic at the beginning of the Nineties. He helped to unleash the creative imaginations of talents such as Richard Hudson, with his vertiginously raked set for Too Clever By Half, and Nigel Lowery with his breathtaking, painterly designs for The Illusion - a production of which Jones is rightly proud.

At this stage of the game, he has no idea how Holy Mothers will fit with the rest of his work, much less what people will make of it. "The best pieces of theatre create their own world, and it certainly fulfils that criterion," he says. "This will either ring your bell or it won't. People will have extreme reactions either way."

A grin flashes across his face. "I can see at least one friend of mine, an opera singer, just whooping with delight."

`Holy Mothers' previews at the New Ambassadors, London WC2 from tomorrow (0171-836 6111); `Flight' is at Glyndebourne from 14 Aug (01273 813813)