Ooh La La?

Any new production by McVicar, the enfant terrible from Glasgow turned Britain's most precocious opera director, is an event. The company is coy about the surprises, but the opera, set this time in 1880s Paris, includes a can-can scene, McVicar says.

More importantly, he's returning this story of a country nobleman's powerful passion for a Parisian belle to its roots in Alexandre Dumas's novel La Dame aux Camlias, itself based on the author's love, Alphonsine Deplessis, and the "demi-monde" of Paris courtesans. The opera, he complains, often plays out in lavish ballroom scenes. He's opting instead for the intimate settings of a courtesan's apartment in Paris, laced with sauciness and sex.

"Maybe I said I loathed Traviata because I had only ever seen productions of it I found ridiculous and risible," he says. "It is perfectly possible to see a production of La Traviata where the audience have absolutely no idea what the story is about, and what actually is the problem with this woman."

McVicar has addressed, in his inimitable style, the glaring gaps in the relationship between Violetta and Alfredo, perhaps opera's most lyrical lovers.

La Traviata opens with their first meeting in the first act, followed by the famous drinking song, and Alfredo's declaration of love and long admiration. It moves in the next to their living in his country house three months later, with his father arriving to try and break up the scandalous relationship.

"There's a great problem with it in that there is a whole act missing, when the lovers are together," McVicar says "They meet, and then you jump for months, and they are already splitting up, and you don't get that depiction of their intense sexual relationship. It's a curiously sexless opera, considering the subject matter."

Exactly what has McVicar done to address that missing act? From a director who has often employed nudity, do we find them in bed, or violently squabbling? Director and company remain coy.

Soprano Carmen Giannattasio says: "Nobody knows what they were doing in the country house for months. Finally, after centuries, you see Violetta and Alfredo really being in love, really having a relationship. In this version, this direction, you can imagine how much they loved."

David McVicar has a prickly reputation among journalists. When he doesn't like a question – such as what his parents did while he was growing up in Glasgow, or whether he brings a gay sensibility to his interpretations of opera – he doesn't answer it. He can afford not to suffer fools gladly; last year he directed nine operas in Europe, the US, and the UK, and is booked until 2013.

It's a far cry from the unhappy Glasgow schoolboy "entranced" by his first opera aged nine, when he saw Ingmar Bergman's airy, fantastical film of Mozart's The Magic Flute, on television. About three years later he saw his first live production by Scottish Opera in Glasgow – he thinks it was Don Giovanni – and is back here partly to signal his support for a Scottish opera company.

McVicar spent his last year at school on a project studying and designing his own Magic Flute from start to finish. After training at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, he moved to directing musicals, and even directed David Tennant in a pantomime at Dundee Rep. His first opera, Mozart's Il Re Pastore, for Opera North, came in 1993.

"He is an opera director," says Robin Ticciati, the boyishly young new principal conductor for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Ticciati has never met McVicar but knows his productions well as a conductor with Glyndebourne. "His roots are in opera in a very deep way and he knows the psychology of a singer, the inner working of music on stage."

It is what McVicar brings to movement on stage, he says, as in 2005's landmark Giulio Cesare. "When you put movement to music it has to be done in such a way that it tells the story with a sense of realism," he says.

Giannattasio first worked with McVicar three years ago, which is why he brought the Italian-born soprano to Glasgow as a young Violetta. "We are used to seeing in the opera these big movements, the clich, the hands on the front for the meaning of suffering, and falling down and this kind of stuff usually used in the opera world," she says. "With David it's completely different. The more it's simple, the more it's real, the more it's touching, the more it works. You don't need to roll on the floor just to say I'm here, I'm singing, and I'm telling this, and this. The strongest for me is in the eyes, in the face. This is what you have to act."

McVicar agreed to do La Traviata for Scottish Opera – it is a joint production with Welsh National Opera – "because they asked" but also because it gave him the time and conditions to fashion his own version. "I would never have accepted at a big American house or Covent Garden because you just wouldn't get the cast to rehearse. They would just turn up with so many preconceptions."

Verdi based his sickly but alluring courtesan Violetta Valry on Marguerite Gautier, heroine of Alexandre Dumas' novel La Dame aux Camlias. Gautier was based in turn on Dumas' real lover Marie, later Alphonsine Duplessis, stricken with TB in her early 20s.

Dumas's novel was published in the 1840s; McVicar has set his Traviata in the Paris of the 1880s. "We've gone for the 1880s and we've purely done that for the profile of the female costumes, it's just an aesthetic, such a beautiful, beautiful, female form," he says. "Long bustles with trains at the back, but the bodices are extremely simple, very low cut and very revealing. It was about Carmen, knowing that we had her and what period is really going to make her look a million dollars. On such considerations hang decisions about period."

He ruled out a modern setting for La Traviata because the "demi-monde" of the great courtesans, a world he is intent on bringing to the stage, ceased to exist after the Second World War.

McVicar runs off the names of the great 19th century courtesans, such as Cora Pearl, the Englishwoman famous in Paris for her romances with great men and her lingerie bill. His settings for Traviata may borrow from the lush paintings of James Tissot, but they rest in the world of the courtesan's salons.

He earned his "bad boy" reputation putting cocaine-sniffing in La Bohme, and has often featured nudity in his operas, including sometimes the principal singers. He's not out to shock, he says, but to contextualise the story, really tell who the characters are, stress Violetta's history.

"I saw a production at the Chicago Lyric Opera last season, where the curtain goes up and the woman is living in f***ing Versailles," he says. "You're like, how much money is she making on her back? Everyone is beautifully dressed, and all the ladies have tiaras on, and it just looks like the Embassy Ball of My Fair Lady, and you have no sense of this woman's life, and who these men are, what these men are after who are flocking round them. You get no sense of what is behind Violetta."

The much-loved 1982 film of La Traviata, with Placido Domingo, was also "beautiful but incredibly overdone, incredibly oversized", McVicar says. For this touring show, which will go to Edinburgh and north to Aberdeen and Inverness, he's transferring it from a costume extravaganza to an intimate affair inspired by the courtesans' modest apartments, where their salon parties were held.

"I am interested in contextualising this story, making it really clear that there is not a single woman on that stage who is a baroness," he says. "If they are at Violetta's party, they are not part of respectable fashionable society, they are all women living on the other side of the fence. It's saucy, the possibility of sex is in the air. Which doesn't mean it's a bordello; it's not. It's the salon of a courtesan. You have to be someone in society to get through the door, but once you are through, your coat is off and you are going to have a good time."

La Traviata is at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, 30 October and 1 November, then tours to Inverness, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Belfast. For a full list of dates, visit www.scottishopera.org.uk

BACKGROUND

THE character of Violetta in La Traviata, "The Woman Who Strayed", is typically portrayed on the opera stage as a languishing, ladylike beauty who makes the ultimate sacrifice for her lover between lavish ballroom receptions.

But the original inspiration for the character was Alphonsine Duplessis, lover of the novelist Alexandre Dumas, whose story La Dame Aux Camlias Verdi used for La Traviata.

The mistress of Dumas and then the composer Franz Liszt, she died of tuberculosis at the age of 23, mourned by many, but there's no indication she gave herself up for love.

"The real Alphonsine, her apartment was four rooms: a bedroom, a dressing room, a salon and a dining room," says David McVicar. "The kitchen was communal in the stable-block downstairs. In the 1880s they were taking baths, but she did not have a bathroom, though I'm sure she had a toilet. When they are hungry she sends out to a caf for food."

According to descriptions by Dumas, McVicar says, Alphonsine "plays the piano badly, she swears a lot, she throws music across the room, she kicks her shoes off, drinks far too much champagne, she tells dirty jokes".

The courtesans of the Paris "demi-monde" were a set of vastly different characters. They were a world of fallen women, whom aristocratic men sought out by exchanging cards at the theatre or riding in the Bois du Boulogne. "Cora Pearl was a famous one in the 1850s in Paris who was positively tomboyish. A lot of people found her ugly, but what she clearly had was an incredible sexual charisma," says McVicar. "Whereas the Italian courtesan in Paris called La Paiva, she kept going to her fifties, with a vampire-like quality in the heaviness of her make-up. It was her clothes and style and famous reputation that made her desirable."