A hero among all the villains

Tim Supple has marked out his patch in theatre with playful, imaginative reworkings of familiar fables. "Narrative myths," he calls them. His staging at the Young Vic of two doses of Grimm's Tales and an iconoclastic version of The Jungle Book have been a welcome anti-dote to the traditional turkeys of Christmas theatregoing. In the Cottesloe he wrought the same magic on Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

The setting has always been intimate, the stage trickery low-tech, but the overall package brilliantly novel. He is the closest British theatre comes to having its own Julie Taymor, the fearsomely high-brow graduate of the New York fringe who staged The Lion King.

More than a director, though not quite a writer, he is that adaptable thing, a deviser.

Like Taymor, the one thing lacking in Supple's CV as artistic director of the Young Vic since 1991 is an engagement with new writing. He did once mount John Byrne's trilogy The Slab Boys, but that only "helped me work out that I didn't want to play realistic work on that stage," he says. His latest gig at once confronts that gap and backs away from it. The Villains' Opera is a new play by Nick Dear, with a musical setting by Stephen Warbeck and starring the outgoing ensemble.

It will paint a portrait of a teeming London underworld familiar from the screen and perhaps the street, but hardly ever hauled on to the stage.

There are scenes in a pub, an underground car park, a prison cell, a nightclub, a Tube station, even in that traditional port of call for the modern male sensibility, a lap-dancing joint.

It sounds fascinatingly up to date. The title, however, is the giveaway. Although a complete rewrite, the template is John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, a perennial coat-hanger to drape a new show on, as National regulars will know from Brecht's Threepenny Opera and Alan Ayckbourn's A Chorus of Disapproval. Even the names of the south London lowlifers are intact - Macheath, Peachum, Locket and co.

"It's a satirical homage to London," says Supple. "The intention of the original and of The Villains' Opera was to satirise straight society through the mirror image of the underworld. It is a profession, a business, it has a hierarchy, there are relations between employers and employees, it's got the little man trying to be the big man, there's the violence of men towards women. It's the London that I know exists and that you can see behind closed doors or in pubs you might not go into, that you know happens when you get tucked up in bed at night."

It's Supple's first epic British production since he directed Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench in Renaissance's Coriolanus in 1992. The following year he took charge of the Young Vic, where the size of the auditorium determined the scale of his work. When he worked for the RSC, he did so in the Swan. "I got very very into that intimacy with the audience, the way poetry can be played on a human scale." Last year, though, he was invited by Cameron Mackintosh to direct Les Miserables in Tel Aviv. While there, he got an invitation to direct what turned out, after long discussion with Trevor Nunn, to be The Villains' Opera, and Much Ado About Nothing in the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin. "I said I have to pursue these offers, and we all agreed that it was time for the Young Vic to have someone else. The thing about that building is it needs a high level of commitment from everybody. You don't get paid much. The artistic leadership has to be focused and creative. It's not got a star policy, and it relies on every two or three years reviving its intentions and its energy. I've been there eight years, and that's OK for a place like that. It's high burnout."

Supple is embracing his liberation into the Olivier with reckless abandon. After getting back from Berlin, he will direct Romeo and Juliet, and then the big Christmas production of Alice in Wonderland, both with a new National ensemble. As with The Villains' Opera, the two shows will enlarge on the familiar Supple theme of wresting control over stories in public ownership.

"There are a few interesting things about Romeo that I haven't seen very much. I haven't seen it ever be as thrilling as I feel it is on the page. I wonder why that is. An insight into young love - that's been done to death. But as a full social portrait of a group of people, prince to nurse - I want that side of it to be achieved as well. That's what the Olivier offers."

As for Alice, he's the only British writer-director with the credentials to offer a convincing alternative to Tenniel's illustrations. "The biggest lesson I learnt from Grimm's was to allow myself to remember what Hansel and Gretel felt like to me when I first read it when I was young. It was my first encounter with what the Holocaust must have felt like when as a young Jewish boy [Supple is a Jonsonian corruption of Sopel] I first heard about it. We must return to the sensation of first experience - the existential terror when Alice thinks she is going to shrink away. If that means it appears less Victorian than expected, then quite right too. Reading it again, what struck me is how Beckettian it is. The Mad Hatter's tea party - waiting, waiting, moving round the table."