Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1993 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a theatre opera and television director. He spent the first five years of his life in Shanghai and then moved to a dull Melbourne suburb when the communists forced his family to flee.

He studied for a postgraduate degree at Oxford where his supervisor Isaiah Berlin taught him a great deal but eventually advised him to follow a theatrical career.

At the age of 28 he scored a tremendous success with the production of Peter Grimes at

Covent Garden. He moved on to the National Theatre where a play he did flopped

badly. He took a long time to recover his nerve but happily for audiences

around the world he's long been back on top. his Beckett and Serino de Bezj

in the West End. He is Elijah, Moschinsky. But you haven't made a movie yet,

is that a field yet to conquer?

I suppose so, but I actually haven't been asked to make a movie yet. That's the main thing.

And I think the thing about making movies is that you've more she haven't been asked to make a movie yet, that's the main thing.

And I think the thing about making movies is that you more of

less have to have the idea first.

You have to originate them.

The obvious question to someone with your diverse talent is which do you prefer theatre

opera or television or do they all have their merits and their

disadvantages? Well I like the mixture actually I think they all do have their

merits they're often very similar and if it goes well they're very

similar but if it goes badly they tend to be very different. I think doing a play

and getting stuck with a script that doesn't work and actors that don't work

it's quite different to doing an opera that takes flight musically,

...