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Production line: 'I want to get away from the idea of the Festival Hall as a sort of garage where you can park your car,

Lady in red: Tsakane Valentine Maswanganyi as Carmen, and Andrew Clarke as Joe, one of the men she loves

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As she sits down with me after a day-long rehearsal for Carmen Jones, Jude Kelly seems visibly to draw breath for the first time in months. The artistic director of the Southbank Centre recently re-opened the Royal Festival Hall, on time and with (almost) all of its £91 million refit costs covered. The inaugural participatory extravaganza Overture, which spanned the weekend of 6-8 June and drew 250,000 people to the much-loved SE1 landmark, ushered in a varied programme of classical concerts cerebral enough to satisfy musical purists of every stripe, and events (Jarvis Cocker's Meltdown, St Etienne's cinematic tribute to the Hall) eclectic enough to reassert the RFH's reputation as a "People's Palace" for everyone.

Rather than sit back and enjoy the moment, Kelly, 53, plunged immediately into preparations for her production of Oscar Hammerstein's all-black theatrical adaptation of Bizet's opera Carmen. Outside the rehearsal room she attends to her other roles, as chair of the committee steering the artistic component of London's 2012 Olympics, and as a mother.

Her daughter Caroline, 20, is a writer, and her son Robbie, 17, has recently entered the English National Ballet School as a trainee dancer, but both still live at home and are, Kelly says, her main source of enjoyment when she is not working. "Lots of people do three jobs to feed their families," says the woman once described as "Lucozade on legs". "I do three jobs because I love doing it and I'm lucky."

She does feel vindicated by the response to the reopened Hall. "People really do love the building," she says, "and they're glad the Southbank Centre is back and kicking, with a new energetic artistic burst." Since Kelly came from a theatrical background, having set up BAC, founded the West Yorkshire Playhouse and regularly featured on runners and riders lists for the top job at the National Theatre, some commentators, including the Evening Standard's Norman Lebrecht, voiced concerns that the RFH's classical heritage and its four resident orchestras might not be entirely safe in her hands. Kelly insists her programme disproves this.

"It's slightly disturbing that some people assume that only people who are dyed in the wool in classical music as a profession can care for it and believe in it," she says, "but I do think [those commentators] now feel more secure, and they should do, because what I feel the Southbank Centre and the Festival Hall are partly there to do is to help create a renaissance in classical music, to make it as valid and as validated as the visual arts have become again."

Conversations with Christophe von Dohnanyi, conductor of the Philharmonia, have led her to believe that " classical music is already on the move", finally shrugging off the schism between the romantic/baroque tradition and post-war experimentalism that effectively shut out all but the cognoscenti. Now as ever, Kelly says she believes in breaking down barriers, between audiences and artists, and between art forms.

To this end she has appointed resident

artists and associates at the Hall to generate new work and ideas and to "get away from the idea of the Hall as a sort of garage where you can park your car, although we will still be partly a hosting venue, because there are a lot of great producers out there and they need somewhere to put their work on".

In which case, I say, Carmen Jones seems to tick an awful lot of boxes. Hammerstein's show is both hugely musically demanding and a work with immense popular appeal. Kelly's version establishes the RFH as a producing venue for large-scale works, but it is coproduced by impresario Raymond Gubbay. The show will deploy two of the RFH's resident orchestras, the Philharmonia and London Philharmonic, in the very centre of the stage. And its allblack cast speaks directly to the ideas of accessibility and social accountability that traditionally accompany subsidised art. Kelly bridles a bit.

"I hate the notion of box-ticking," she says. "When I thought, 'Let's do Carmen Jones,' it was instinctive, and I didn't have to think about it for very long. I was very excited about the idea of using the orchestras but even if we didn't have our own in residence I'd have wanted to use a proper symphony orchestra because the visceral experience for an audience of an orchestra on that scale is overwhelming."

THE APPEAL of an all-black show went beyond mere lip service to political correctness. "We all talk a lot about diversity, but the reality is that it's still quite hard to see work on our stages that reflects London as it is now," she says. "We have fantastic black performers in this country - there are 40 in our cast and we auditioned nearly 500 - but they rarely get to work on top-class vehicles that will expand their repertoire. "

The cast includes Tsakane Valentine Maswanganyi, who trained in opera in Pretoria before joining the British opera crossover band Amici Forever, as Carmen, and London-born opera-singing brothers Andrew and Rodney Clarke as Joe and Husky, the men she loves.

Kelly has not, as previously reported, relocated the play to Cuba, but she is giving it a generic Latin American setting. "When Hammerstein adapted Carmen, he set it in south Carolina because he felt

the nearest thing to [Bizet's] gypsy outcast group were the black communities of the southern states," she says. "That's not the case now - and also the book makes no reference to civil rights or anything to do with racism. But for the story to be credible, you need to have a society that has a standing army, and a community where both religion and superstition are embedded in the psyche."

H e r choreo g raphe r R aphae l Bonachela, who has worked with Kylie Minogue and Tina Turner, is also Spanish but Kelly claims this is incidental. "I asked him to become an artist in residence after seeing a piece he did called Soledad, which was very sensuous and quite violent," she says. "And the choreography in Carmen Jones doesn't have many routines: it's psychologically driven. It's about the dramas that are unfolding rather than about set steps."

Kelly acknowledges that she doesn't yet know how a fully-staged musical will work in the Hall's open auditorium, but generally she seems buoyed by the very spirit of optimism that inspired the Festival of Britain committee to build the RFH more than 50 years ago.

She thinks that her team has "got sight of " the last £6 million in funding needed to complete the Hall's structural refurbishment. Like everyone in the arts, she is nervous about the forthcoming government review of spending, but - while playing down her reputation as a New Labour insider - she refuses to believe that Gordon Brown will backtrack on the investment made, in terms of confidence as well as cash, during the Blair years. Indeed, she foresees a time when the arts are as central to public life as education. And, though she's not giving away any concrete details of the cultural events that will accompany the Games five years hence, she's even optimistic about the Olympics.

"In 1948, when Britain last hosted the Games, they gave out medals for the arts," she says. "And the Olympics is the only world festival of humanity. It may have its problems but it is non-religious, non-political, and two-thirds of the world's population watch it on television. That's an extraordinary achievement. So when I was asked to lead the cultural thinking for the bid, I put it to the different arts communities that not to be involved would be a terrible mistake, and they all got on board.

"Of course, in hindsight, you have to say that people didn't expect us to win. The budget and the ramifications hadn't been thought through as thoroughly as they had been by

Paris. The fall-out of discovering that has been very big - and there is not much money."

So should we not have won the Olympics, or should culture not be part of it? "I can't think either of those two things are true. My belief - and this is happening - is that as the cultural community comes up with brilliant ideas the money will follow." The woman who reopened the Festival Hall, on time and close to budget fixes me with a beady eye. "It will be difficult," she says, "but lots of worthwhile things are difficult."

 

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