Monica Mason: Leaping forward

Today, Monica Mason, the new director of the Royal Ballet, unveils her first season's programme. Here, she tells Nadine Meisner how she intends to steady a shaken company

The Royal Opera House may have a state-of-the-art, turbo-accelerated procedure for speedily ejecting wayward ballet directors, but it has only one ballet director's office. It feels distinctly odd to enter the room where I had interviewed an optimistic Ross Stretton 18 months ago, and find a different person there.

It probably feels even odder to Monica Mason, propelled to the hot seat after 11 years as assistant director, first to Anthony Dowell, then to Stretton. Looking round, I don't spot any sign of a chute for dispatching directors to oblivion, but maybe one is hidden behind either of the two large, wall-mounted photographs of the company's choreographic masters, Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan,

I'm reflecting on the symbolism of their side-by-side positioning – some of us see them as engaged in a continuing tug-of-war in the performing calendar – when Mason points to another portrait on the wall behind me. Dame Ninette de Valois, the company's founder, is still overseeing everything, staring at the director's desk directly opposite. She completes a ghostly triumvirate to daunt even the stoutest heart, already trembling with the realisation that managing the Royal Ballet repertoire is pretty well impossible. It has a range, Mason maintains, equalled by few other companies, and she has now selected, shaped and possibly added to it for her first season's programming (2003-4), to be announced today.

A director has to juggle the old or "heritage" repertoire with the new; maintain the 20th-century classics as well as the 19th-century ones; import foreign successes and support indigenous efforts; and of course share out space between Ashton and MacMillan. No matter how the portions are carved out, many people in many places will be seriously displeased.

As an Australian outsider, Stretton brought a welcome fresh slant, Mason says, and she certainly hopes to build on the relationship he inaugurated with the European choreographers Mats Ek and Jiri Kylian. But as the converse arch-insider, she's even more interested in developing British choreographers. "There are people here who've never made a piece for us and I'm looking to use them." Aren't they working in contemporary dance, though, rather than classical ballet? No, not all of them. Will she name names? No, she won't. But she does have some future scheme up her sleeve for enabling their creativity.

Mason also well knows that the company has not had a resident choreographer since David Bintley left for Birmingham Royal Ballet. What she hopes to achieve, when she retires at 65 in four and a half years, is at least half a remedy. "I'd love to feel that we might have allowed a new choreographer to emerge. I don't know that it necessarily has to be a resident choreographer, but I'd hope it would be someone who likes working here and finds the dancers an inspiration." She would also like to fill the gap on the musical side whereby the company no longer has a music director or even a principal conductor to give guidance and support.

As a Royal Ballet principal she was noted for her musicality. Her vivid, chiselled features made her less a pure classical dancer, more a demi-caractère one, at her best as the doomed Chosen Maiden in MacMillan's Rite of Spring or her gently comic part in the same choreographer's Elite Syncopations. These days, the thick dark hair is grey, the South African accent is muted. Born in Johannesburg, she moved to London aged 14 with her mother and sister. In 1958, aged 17, she joined the company's corps de ballet, and stayed and stayed.

As director, that means she has an in-depth knowledge of the heritage works and although she may want to encourage creative experiment, she also insists that the Royal Ballet's core must remain rigorously classical. "When we come to do the classics like The Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake that's when we know we're really up against it. And of course it's extremely difficult if the dancers have spent a long time doing contemporary work. The shock is huge, even if you're doing class every day."

In her first years with the Royal Ballet, the principal choreographers – Ashton, John Cranko, MacMillan – were in-house. Gradually this changed, the repertoire became more international and by the 1980s contemporary dance was beginning to infiltrate the aesthetic. Does her intention to encourage British choreographers signal a return to the more insular early days? "No, you can't ever go back. We need to understand our history and I'm very keen for the Royal Ballet to have a distinct identity, but it wouldn't be appropriate to have the one that belonged to the Fifties or Sixties. We're in a different time altogether now. Bringing together talented dancers able to embrace a large variety of work, that's what we want."

Above all, quality is what counts: productions that are properly staged and rehearsed; performances that have interpretative depth and musical sensitivity. She doesn't accept that the eclectic backgrounds of today's Royal Ballet dancers endanger quality or even stylistic unity. "If you've got dancers with a sound base, then you can achieve the style you want."

One thing that Mason is not, is glib. Her answers are carefully measured and thoughtful. But asked whether she might take more recruits from the Royal Ballet School, as used to happen many years ago, she shrugs and does a verbal side step. "You'll have a year when there is perhaps less talent, then another when there is a sudden wonderful crop." Or is it that the teaching at the school isn't up to scratch nowadays? Either way, the school has left its shabby west London home for new Floral Street premises next door to the Royal Opera House, to be opened by the Queen tomorrow.

Today, meanwhile, is the Royal Ballet announcement for the 2003-4 programming. Can she confirm that Ashton's Cinderella will be redesigned? That MacMillan's Isadora will be revived? That a Diaghilev bill will materialise? She smiles inscrutably. Will her programming take into account that 2004 is not only the centenary of Balanchine's birth, but also Ashton's? She smiles even more inscrutably. But she is ready to deny that her professional proximity to MacMillan as a dancer and coach of his work will lead her to neglect Ashton after any centenary celebrations. "I very much want," she insists, "the company to dance Ashton the way it should be danced."

What about de Valois's own choreography? We look up at her portrait. "They are fascinating, but the difficulty," Mason sighs, "is that the longer they're out of the repertoire, the harder they are to revive. Nowadays we're reaching the point where there are fewer and fewer people around able to coach them." But at least de Valois can serve as an inspiration to Mason in her directorship. "She seemed to have such clarity of thought and enormous energy. Her aims were so far-seeing. She did say towards the end of her life that it was easier founding a company than maintaining it. But that's no excuse for us."

While de Valois was the mercurial visionary, Mason looks likely to be the safe consolidator, the steadying hand after the squalls of the Stretton regime. After seeking to blow new air into the Royal Ballet by appointing Stretton, the ROH Board then did a frightened U-turn by scurrying back to the old guard with Mason. Today's press conference, of course, may prove that assessment wrong.