Director's career goes full circle in season of G&S and tragedy

Ghosts that flit around, an art gallery that comes to life, and the head of a family who is cursed to commit a wrongdoing every day, are just a few of the problems facing the director of Opera North's new production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Ruddigore.

As Jo Davies explains, she has been there before and knows all the pitfalls awaiting her Opera North debut.

"As a teenager I had offered to help backstage for an amateur operatic company. That turned out to be Ruddigore and as I looked on from the wings I fell in love with the work and with the theatre in general."

It was eventually to take her to New York to study at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy before returning to the UK to work in very diverse media – from major Shakespearean productions through to London's West End musicals.

Presently busy on opera projects on both sides of the Atlantic, she had worked with Phyllida Lloyd in the award-winning film of Opera North's staging of Benjamin Britten's Gloriana.

"I'm certainly not a G&S junkie, but I suppose most of us who come through the ranks of the theatre have had some connection with Gilbert and Sullivan, and you have to admire the skill and craftsmanship that went into putting their scores together.

"This story is typical late Victorian melodrama that might not go down too well with today's younger generation, so I have moved it to the days of silent films when gorgeous young damsels were tied to railway lines by the big, bad landlord, and found that approach ideal for Ruddigore."

The cast is headed by Richard Burkhard as the evil Sir Despard Murgatroyd, while the role of good Robin Oakapple is taken by Grant Doyle who scored a major success as Albert in Opera North's Werther.

The coy young damsel, Rose Maybud, sees the welcome return of soprano Amy Freeston.

The winter season opens in a fortnight with the return of Phyllida Lloyd's staging of Puccini's La Bohme.

It is a Christmas opera, the first act is set on the eve of the festive day, though the outcome makes us forget that.

Lloyd is moving it forward by a hundred years to Paris in the 1950s.

The struggling students face problems with money for their party night, their spendthrift evenings on the town having left them all very much in debt. Do things never change?

The French soprano, Ann Sophie Duprels, the gorgeous geisha girl in the company's Madama Butterfly, plays Mimi and, fresh from his triumph in Glyndebourne Opera's staging of Verdi's Falstaff, comes the Turkish tenor, Bulent Bezduz, to sing her lover, Rudolph.

The company's box-office hit throughout the autumn, Mozart's Cosi fan Tutte returns to complete the season, which will also travel to Salford, Newcastle and Nottingham.

Opera North, Leeds Grand Theatre, Jan 15-Feb 20. Tel: 0844 8482706.