Death becomes him

'I can't go into that... I'm sorry, you'll have to come and see the play if you want to know that... I don't understand your question...'

I'm at the Lyric Hammersmith interviewing David McVicar. He's directing Camille, a new adaptation of La Dame Aux Camelias starring Daniela Nardini, which begins previewing on Thursday. It's his lunch break.

I've been told that he has a cold. ('No, I don't,' he says bluntly when I ask.) He looks pale and weary, and at times during our half hour makes me feel like I'm torturing a caged animal.

But it's far from my intention. I have huge respect for McVicar's operatic work - including a violent, revelatory Rigoletto at the Royal Opera House and a spellbinding Rape Of Lucretia at ENO - and hope he'll share some insights into his approach to the play. He has such a clear-eyed ability to examine the mechanics of abuse and sexual brutality that I'm sure he's an ideal candidate to tackle this story of a dying prostitute forced by a hypocritical society to give up her last chance of happiness.

We have several false starts. Did he consider, for example, changing the setting from 19th-century Paris? 'No. Why on earth would I want to do anything like that?' he answers. He tells me the central character Marguerite 'goes down fighting', so I ask him how. 'Come and see the play,' he says with a bemused look. 'I don't understand the question.'

Camille is McVicar's first 'straight' theatre project in eight years: the first time he allows a little oxygen into the conversation is when I ask him about the difference between this and opera. He warms up: 'The great thing about singers is that they come knowing the text.

Actors come still on the book, searching around for meanings - directing them is like trying to throw lifelines out in the fog. Also, opera singers have no methodology to their acting - it's instinct. Actors sometimes feel they have to have a pseudoscientific justification for their work, and it keeps them locked in their heads. I battle it with all my might. I want them to tell a story, and choose the strongest options to get drama.'

And what exactly are the options for Marguerite, her lover Armand, and his overbearing father? 'I can't go into that.' Slap. Into the brick wall again.

But things begin to flow when we get on to La Traviata, Verdi's operatic retelling of Alexandre Dumas's story. McVicar loathes it. 'Verdi is so not engaging with the anger of the story. Sorry, Marguerite is not a grand courtesan, kept by one lover - it's like a revolving door in that apartment.

And that absurd death scene, with "her sins washed clean by her sacrifice"... it makes me want to puke it's so trashy and coarse.'