Director Stephen Barlow, creator of new production of Jonathan Dove’s Flight for Scottish Opera

Almost three years on from the announcement of his appointment, however, an entire acclaimed production has made the journey to Scotland, in a “reimagined” version that opened in Glasgow this month.

Jonathan Dove’s Flight was commissioned by Glyndebourne Festival Opera and has been revived there twice since it premiered in 1998. Inspired by the true story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee who lived for nearly 18 years in Terminal One of Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, the opera went on to be produced around the world but the Holland Park version in 2015 was, surprising, only the second UK staging, and Scottish Opera’s is the Scottish premiere of what is the composer’s most successful work.

The director who created the revival, UK-domiciled Australian Stephen Barlow, is back on board for the new version, as are three of the cast, former Scottish Opera Emerging Artist Jennifer France as the Controller, James Laing as the Refugee and Victoria Simmonds as Minskwoman.

In a break from rehearsals, Barlow is evidently very pleased with the way things are going.

“Stuart Stratford and I had worked together very happily at Holland Park, and when he saw Flight he said it was something Scottish Opera were thinking of doing. They could have done a whole new production as they are having to build a new set in any case, but I’m really glad that they have decided to do this one.

“It has been a fantastic present to get to do it again and to make some changes. The point is to make it even better. It is mostly a new cast with three people returned from the original cast. The stage is a completely different shape and there are a few more bells and whistles, so people who have seen it before will notice differences.

“So this is not a revival, this is re-imagining it. Just this morning we came back to a scene that I had staged pretty similarly to how we did it previously, but today I was looking at the singers and I said I thought we should do it differently. It felt like there was another way so we have explored and are now going with an alternative. You have to be alive to new possibilities. I find it easier and quicker to make it up rather than try and recreate something. After all, that is what we did the first time around.”

Barlow’s own journey from a childhood in Australia to directing opera internationally appears to have been seamlessly linear narrative.

“Apparently when I was nine I said to my parents I was going to move to London and work in the theatre. I had discovered a suitcase of souvenirs of a trip they made to London and New York after they were married with theatre programmes I thought were fascinating. My family is not particular musical, although they did have LPs of Broadway musicals like Rogers and Hammerstein and I went to a school with a very good theatre department and music department and I was in the choir, so music and drama were part of my life from a boy.

“I studied classical singing in Australia and then moved here 20 years ago when I finished university and did quite a lot of musical theatre in London and around the country. Directing happened by accident when a show I was in had a revival and the director phoned me up and said: ‘I’m not free, do you want to do it? You asked all the questions a director would ask in rehearsals.’

So I was a bit nervous about doing it, but about half way through the first session it felt absolutely natural. The show was Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury, which is a condensed opera of 45 minutes; I think it’s their best show. It was at the Covent Garden festival, opposite the opera house, and from there I went to Glyndebourne and the Royal Opera House as an assistant director and associate director and from that to doing my own work for the past fifteen years.”

The list of those Barlow worked with is starry indeed, including Elijah Moshinsky, Peter Sellars, Robert Lepage, Robert Wilson, Sir Peter Hall and Graham Vick.

“They are all so different that I realised there is only one way to direct and that is your own way. Don’t copy anyone else. There is no rule book for directing and I learned just to trust my own instincts and responses to material. The two directors that most inspired me, although they are very different, were Jonathan Kent and Peter Sellars because they treated everyone in the room – not just the cast – with respect and made them feel an equal member of the team. With some other directors you felt it was more about them and while you learn from everybody, sometimes you learn what not to do.

“I was assistant director to Trevor Nunn on Anything Goes at the National Theatre which was a huge hit and that was an incredible experience. He’s very inclusive, he treats everybody well and is a real gentleman. The story-telling detail that he did was wonderful to watch. Like him, I like to get involved on the floor of the rehearsal room, but I have absolutely no frustrations about being a performer. When the curtain is going up I’m so relieved that it is them up there and not me.

“I’ve no desire to perform because I’m working with world-class people and I can’t do what they do. What we ask opera singers to do is incredibly difficult. To be able to sing in that way requires years of training and then we often ask them to work in another language and with some crazy staging live in front of two thousand people with no microphones. You can’t fake opera singing, so I am always very respectful of their craft.”

Flight has received some criticism from heavyweight critics for being too easy to listen to, but that is an argument cuts no ice with Barlow.

“I refuse to choose between opera and musical theatre because there is quite a big overlap, and the barriers between those two parts of the repertoire are starting to be erased and performers are crossing over. This year on Broadway Renee Fleming is singing in Carousel and I think that’s really healthy because my job is as a storyteller with music and I don’t mind whether it is Richard Rogers or Richard Wagner. There is no different way in how I’d approach it. This year I am directing Phantom of the Opera in Norway in a new production that will be the Norwegian premiere and I am going straight to that from doing Barber of Seville. And I think that is wonderful, to have the freedom to move back and forth.

“I don’t understand why comparing an opera to a musical is a pejorative. Opera is musical theatre and the idea that musicals are ‘less’ is ridiculous because we ask musical theatre people to sing act and dance all at the same time. I don’t think you have to choose and I think it is unfair that people sometimes accuse Jonathan Dove’s music of being lightweight as if all modern music has to be incredibly difficult and inaccessible and atonal. That’s fine too, but don’t criticise the man because he writes music that is attractive and people want to listen to it.

“What I love about Flight is that from the get-go you want to hear more. There are modern operas that are like a dose of medicine – you know it’s good for you, but it is hell having to endure it. Jonathan and his librettist April de Angelis take you by the hand and guide you through it, unlike a lot of modern opera can be deliberately in-your-face and provoking an audience; that’s not his style. I don’t think they should be criticised for writing something that I think is the most popular British opera since Britten’s Peter Grimes in terms of the number of performances around the world.”

This Flight does, however, come into a world much changed from the time it was written in. The story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri was reported in the 1990s as a unique Kafka-esque dilemma that was not without its comic side, whereas as now we all too familiar of the plight of thousands of stateless refugees, while the glamour days of air travel as also long in the past.

“I have asked Jonathan Dove if he would have written the same opera post-9/11, and he said ‘probably not’. What the piece now has is a nostalgia for a time that is lost before airports became the kind of humiliating experience they are today.

“So we have consciously decided that we want it to feel nostalgic and references that are dated – like one to Sock Shop, for instance - have been left in. The designer Andrew Riley and I have deliberately gone for something that is 90s nostalgic without being too obvious – the one giveaway clue is that there are no personal mobile telephones.

“Back in the 1990s people viewed the piece as a comic opera, but now it would be very insensitive to what’s happening around us if we thought this was just funny, a man trapped in an airport with no papers. We see what people do know to try to sail across oceans to start a new life, so the piece has come into sharper focus given what has been happening on our doorstep.

“The brief from Glyndebourne was to write a Figaro for the late 20th century and while the Marriage of Figaro is very funny, there is lot of pain and heartbreak in it. And the same can be said of this, it has its lighter side but it also touches on some very poignant and vulnerable aspects of our nature. Like a Mozart opera or a Chekhov play, sometimes you are not very sure if you should be laughing or crying.”

Flight is at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal until Saturday, then at Edinburgh's festival theatre from March 1 to March 3. See www.scottishopera.org.uk.