Phyllida Lloyd: 'Peter Grimes is not paedophiliac' Her continuing exploration of the themes and implications of Grimes has led her to see the central character "as an archetypal case of bipolar disorder." He has all the classic symptoms: massive can-do positivity and poetic vision balanced by hopeless depression and blankness. The relationships with the boys don't seem to me sexually paedophiliac. They are just disasters, accidents that stem from these conflicts in his personality, and the result of a mixture of neglect and rage, shot through with tenderness. Calling this abuse in the modern tabloid sense just isn't adequate. Directing opera has been an important thread running through Lloyd's career for more than 20 years, and there could be more to come. But she remains rankled by the fate of her controversial turn-of-the-Millennium English National Opera (ENO) production of Wagner's Ring cycle, which for a complex of reasons was only ever performed in four discrete episodes, and which she feels she left profoundly unfinished. Could it be revived now? I don't think so, but I can't really bear to think about it. The experience of working at Covent Garden on Verdi's Macbeth wasn't happy either, leaving her reluctant to work in major international houses. "It's difficult to rehearse when your leading singers don't even turn up," she says drily. So while I'm looking for an opera to stage and an audience to present it to, I need to find the right people and the right place to stage it, which may not be a conventional one. Opera is too obsessed with buildings. Perhaps I'd be happier on the road, pulling something out of the back of a van, like Britten and Pears did with the English Opera Group. Is she convinced that opera has a future? It seems to be something like gardening that people come to in middle age when mortality bears down on them, but we have to find ways to get the young in too, and that's tricky. The other day we had 40 teenagers visit a rehearsal of Grimes, none of whom had had any previous contact with opera. They were blown away, thrilled, amazed. And I shall never forget taking Act 3 of the ENO Walküre to the Glastonbury Festival, where the audience was almost entirely under 40. But why would it be so hard to get any of that cheering crowd to buy a ticket to a performance of their own volition? Next up, Lloyd is looking to export her recent productions of Julius Caesar, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Josephine and I to New York. Yet Britten's opera continues to haunt her. I want my next film to be something small scale and focused over here: I think Grimes could work brilliantly, so I'm planning to recce wild and isolated sites as far as possible from a branch of Caffè Nero, with Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves at the back of my mind. Peter Grimes opens at Grand Theatre, Leeds (0844 848 2700) on September 14