How we brought Boris back to life

Late October, 1983. Everyone is exalted and exhausted after the final rehearsal of Boris Godunov. As assistant director, my notebook is filled with hundreds of notes. We have just watched the production all the way through.

An extraordinary cast fought their way through hope, despair and pain, bleeding sweat and tears for nearly four hours. The Royal Opera chorus crawled, scrambled and danced their way from the rotting smoke-filled wells - Andrei's rubbish-dumps of history - onto the golden ramp for the final scene of the "revolution", wailing, howling, bawling and laughing in near-perfect Russian. The stage is covered in hundreds of dead bodies and the haunting sounds of the Simpleton's lament are dying out as the snow falls.

Tarkovsky turns to me: "I've got it! That's where the Angel of Death should appear. After the lament. He will appear and open his arms to receive the soul of Russia. In the last few seconds. Forgiveness."

Suddenly the whole is complete. On the first night we shall finally see the Angel. Just a glimpse. A glimpse of hope.

Twenty years on we are recreating the historic event that was Andrei Tarkovsky's Boris Godunov. (I had been invited to assist him then because I was obsessed by theatre, I spoke Russian and Tarkovsky's movies were my religion of choice.) A dancer comes up to me and asks, "Has it really been 20 years?" I know it has - every bone in my body aches from rushing up and down the rehearsal room ramparts.

Twenty years on. My well-worn vocal scores arrive from the archives filled with copious notes from the first production meeting, from our rehearsals, from my later conversations with Tarkovsky, who died in 1986. Can one "remake" an original piece of theatre as one can a ballet, by following instructions on the page? How do we recapture the spirit of the original and the integrity of Tarkovsky's vision, the only opera he ever staged?

There are many challenges. The single set, dominated by a huge central arch, is deceptively simple. It allows the production to be effortlessly fluid, swift, an everchanging platform for an epic narrative. But the set, having travelled around the world, has been adapted by other theatres. Some of it has disintegrated in storage; there are pieces that don't always fit together.

Many of the original production team are involved. We scrutinise old photographs and share memories. My favourite is the story of the globe, which was brought into the rehearsal room one day and placed in a corner. It had been used in the nursery scene in Covent Garden's 1954 production of Boris and was delivered to us, just in case. Tarkovsky had already decided the scene would be played on a map of Russia and the globe stood in the corner for days. Andrei walked around it a couple of times, then asked the stage manager whether the globe could be detached from its support. She said yes. Could it be painted gold? Yes. Could it be suspended on a wire in the central arch? Yes. But why? The answer came during the technical rehearsals, when we witnessed a heart-stopping image of a giant pendulum swinging back and forth in the central arch.

But a theatre production is not a trip down a memory lane. After deeply revealing music sessions with the conductor,