She's all right on the knights

Before the opera glasses focus on a freshened-up Wagner, HEATH LEES meets a director who knows the score.

Few people make a career out of directing operas, but Elke Neidhardt is one of them. What's more, she's carved out that career on both sides of the world, as resident opera director with Australian Opera for a dozen years from 1977, then from 1990 as principal director for the City Opera of Cologne.

Four years ago she returned to Australia, where she's been teaching, directing and animating the opera scene, and gathering superlatives for productions that have included a sell-out Trovatore for Adelaide, and a stunning Fidelio for Sydney and Melbourne.

There's hardly a well-known opera that Neidhardt has not directed, but somehow she keeps bumping up against the big Wagner repertoire. As well as staging his Flying Dutchman and Lohengrin, she's been responsible for reworkings of the complete, four-opera cycle of The Ring music-dramas in Germany, originally staged by the famous theatre director Harry Kupfer.

This Saturday, her production of Wagner's five-hour opera Parsifal will open in Adelaide, the first time the complete opera has been given on any Australian stage.

She's also landed the job of directing in 2004 the first-ever, all-Australian cycle of The Ring for Adelaide, the city that has now established itself as Wagner's unofficial Australian home.

There are New Zealand connections in all of this, too. Neidhardt is enthusiastic about this country's voices and recently came through Auckland, talent-scouting for The Ring. In the past she has given good roles to Kiwi singers. When Parsifal opens on Saturday, the only featured woman's role of Kundry - fiendish in character and fiendishly difficult - will be sung by New Zealand soprano Margaret Medlyn.

Neidhardt's view of Parsifal suggests that the Australian version will raise eyebrows. It might even raise a laugh or two.

"You remember the old jibe - Noel Coward, was it? - about something being so long and boring that it was like Parsifal without the jokes. Well, for the first time this will be Parsifal with the jokes."

Although Neidhardt realises that Wagner's opera (he called it a "Stage-Festival-Dedication-Play") is searching and serious, she doesn't think of the composer as always heavy.

"Think of the Flower-maidens in Act Two," she says breezily, "leaving their men as soon as Parsifal arrives, pretending to seduce him like groupies. Oh yes, it'll be funny on stage."

Neidhardt's clear-eyed view of the work is linked to the fact that it's in Adelaide, which she says has advantages. "In Europe the singers are always flying in and out from one opera to another. Getting a group of them together is almost impossible. But in Adelaide, once you're there you stay there. So everyone will get involved with this one production over the whole rehearsal period, which is great.

"And singers from this part of the world don't bring the burden of European traditions and routines with them. In Germany everyone knows what goes on in the opera, or thinks they do. So you just say to the singers, 'Come in here, sing there, die at that spot', and it all happens.

"With people who haven't done it before it'll be a case of getting right back into it again, and that will make this Parsifal really fresh and exciting."

There's instant passion in her voice when Neidhardt speaks about opera. As a child in Stuttgart she was already crazy about it "to the horror of my father, who hated it," she recalls.

After drama school graduation she acted in theatre, film, TV - wherever there was work. In 1966, after marrying an Australian, she arrived in Melbourne where her son was born. Neidhardt fought housewifery by plaguing producers for roles. "Some of them used me as an actor with an accent, others had parts that needed some kind of heavy foreign sound, so I kept going."

When her marriage "fell apart", she explains, money became a big issue. She saw an advert in The Australian for trainee theatre directors.

"I had languages, and some experience, so they took me. Soon I was getting work with Australian Opera, and later I became their resident director until 1990."

It was in that year, after the major claims of motherhood had passed, Neidhardt summoned up all her courage to go back to Germany to direct. Her success there fully justified the move, but she became disappointed with directors, singers and audiences who she says are "too jaded to accept the story any more; they crave nothing but new treatments; sometimes the work sinks under the treatment".

So she's back, soaking up the freshness of Australia again, and "doing" Wagner.

Parsifal will be different on Saturday night, she says. "It may not be as Wagner envisaged it, but the story will be there, and it will be Wagner's story. I won't cheat the audience out of the main events or ideas. Part of me is too old-fashioned for that.

"But it'll be modern too. Believe me, when they come out of the theatre on Saturday they won't be talking about the next barbie."