Monica Mason: 'It's not about whizz-bang. It's about artistry, maturity, style, emotion' Mason believes that a major responsibility of her directorial role is pastoral care, and under her sympathetic but rigorous guidance, good dancers with team spirit have generally prospered. As the generation of Jonathan Cope, Darcey Bussell and Sylvie Guillem has passed on, she has replenished the stock with younger, top-notch talents including Lauren Cuthbertson, Marianela Nuñez, Steven McRae and Edward Watson. Standards have also remained high in the lower ranks, where the likes of Beatriz Stix-Brunell and Dawid Trzensimiech currently show promise of great things to come. But Mason has her critics, too. Many people feel that her total loyalty to the Royal Ballet has resulted in tunnel vision and that too much of the new work she has commissioned has been slackly curated and third-rate. Others feel that she has allowed the MacMillan Estate too much power, that she has spread the net too wide in the search for dancers and that her relationship with the Royal Ballet School, an institution whose prime purpose is to provide the company with a steady stream of appropriately trained striplings, has not been happy. There may be some justice in these charges, and she visibly bridles when asked whether the school has been giving the company what she requires. "It is essential that the director of the company and the director of the school link up and talk constructively," she replies. But there can be differences of opinion, and there are. Ideally, she would have liked all dancers entering the company to have spent at least a year in the school, "just so they can get to understand the way we work," but this hasn't been possible. And of course, if a marvellous dancer like Tamara Rojo or Carlos Acosta turns up from elsewhere, you'd be mad not to employ them. She admits to some more personal disappointments. A resuscitation of Andrée Howard's La Fête étrange looked faded and creaky - "I realised that there are some things which just don't work without the choreographer's presence" - and she deeply regrets that the company couldn't honour the centenary of one of its early stars, Robert Helpmann. I wanted to revive his version of Hamlet, but it had to be that or a new commission, and I simply couldn't justify the expense of recreating Hamlet from scratch. On a more positive note, she is delighted that her tenure is ending with a season that includes choral ballets such as MacMillan's Gloria and Nijinska's Les Noces, and that the revisiting of these masterpieces is balanced by the hugely ambitious Metamorphosis project with which she bows out. Here even Mason's sternest critics must be silenced by her daring leap into the unknown: seven young choreographers are collaborating with each other and with major living composers and artists (Chris Ofili, Conrad Shawcross and Mark Wallinger, all new to the theatre) on the creation of ballets inspired by three Titian paintings in the National Gallery. "I think everyone concerned is finding it very challenging," she said during rehearsals. My hope is that at the very least something interesting will be sparked by all the different elements. Over her 54 years with the Royal Ballet, Mason has seen revolutionary changes. When she joined up in 1958, "dancers had no voice. We did what we were told and even if you did have an opinion, there was nobody to listen to it. That began to change in the Sixties, when Equity came in. I was the union rep for a time, and remember being terrified at what the management might think of me. The biggest bone of contention was the time we finished rehearsing. There were no fixed breaks, and on performance days you could be driven to exhaustion. In those days our studios were in Barons Court, so we wasted hours every day commuting to and from Covent Garden, sewing our shoes on the Tube. Moving all operations to Covent Garden when the opera house was renovated in 1999 was an enormous boost to morale. "I don't think dancers" discipline has gone, but the world as a whole has less discipline, and dancers today are influenced by that and have become too celebrity-conscious. Some of them seem to think that their status is more important than the work. One wonders if this is a veiled reference to the Russian virtuoso Sergei Polunin, who walked out of the Royal Ballet earlier this year without warning. In my book, the choreographer is king. Technique has changed, too, and in some respects improved. But we aren't in a technical business. It's not about whizz-bang, it's about artistry, maturity, style, emotion. Don't underestimate the audience, I tell dancers. There aren't just 2,000 pairs of eyes out there, but 2,000 brains and imaginations as well, and if you're only thinking about legs and feet, it's not going to satisfy them. Workloads for the dancers remain a major concern. "At a conference recently, one of my colleagues asked, "How much is too much?," which I thought was a very interesting question." She thinks that the Royal Ballet's current corpus of 92 dancers is the right size for the job in hand, but the injury rate is still high. Surgeons can do fantastic things and save careers which 20 years ago would have been lost. But dancers today are required to dance at the highest level of performance in so many different styles that a certain amount of injury remains inevitable. Mason will spend her first summer of official retirement mastering the computer, but she will return to the company next season as a part-time coach. Her experience will remain an invaluable resource to her successors, but ballet's past won't be enough to sustain its future. Can she remain confident that classically based ballet will continue to develop as an art-form beyond her lifetime? "Yes," she replies emphatically. But only if we have the choreographers. Metamorphosis: Titian 2012 is at the Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020 7304 4000), July 14, 16, 17 and 20