Kurt Palm is in Cromwellian mode. "We should close all the opera houses for a year," he announces magisterially. "And theatres too." The flamboyant Austrian director of Opera Ireland's forthcoming production of Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus is not a fan of the staple fare of European opera houses. "The traditional art forms are in a crisis. So much money is poured into these institutions" - £100 million a year to the state opera house in his native Vienna - "and when the curtain goes up, all you can see is the dust of the last century."
When the curtain rises on Die Fledermaus next Friday, what Dublin audiences will see is a cluster of Bright Young Things in 1960s outfits, disporting themselves in front of a Hockney-esque swimming pool, drinking, smoking joints and playing languidly with beach balls. When Strauss's frothy operetta was first performed in the Theater An Der Wien in 1874, it had a contemporary setting, and Kurt Palm sees no point in presenting it as a period piece. "Who wants to see some sort of Jurassic Park treatment?"
Written during the heyday of Austro-Hungarian empire, and based on a libretto by Carl Haffner and Richard Genee, Die Fledermaus (The Bat) satirised the hedonistic way of life of the Viennese aristocracy. Duplicity and disguise, illicit sexual liaisons, dissolute lives, practical jokes and private ambitions combine in the loosely strung plot, drawn together by Strauss's sweet, sparkling score. It's a light, vivacious confection but the music has an orchestral force and formal coherence not conveyed by the term "operetta". Gustav Mahler, who admired it immensely, dubbed it "opera theatre" and brought it into the repertoire of the Vienna Opera in the 1890s. "I've never directed operetta before," Palm says, "but Die Fledermaus occupies a special place in the short history of the form. It is unique, a truly great piece. The influences from Gypsy music and from Hungary are fascinating, because of course it is set in a multi-racial state. The writing is so clever and so well conceived that I would compare it to Figaro or Cosi fan tutte."
Fighting talk, this, which may cause Mozart lovers to bridle, but Palm is adamant. "The social issues are the same - everyone wants to be someone else, to move up the social ladder, to have a different life. "It's all about alcohol and sex. The first act is dominated by wine, the second by champagne and then comes the fierce hangover in Act Three. It was set after the terrible economic crash in Vienna 1874, on Black Friday, when 100,000 people went bankrupt. The mood is escapist, these people are saying: `Let's forget about all that, let's drink to forget'. So we have that drunken hymn to love, Bruderlein und Schwesterlein.
"It's also about the silliness of the men, who are utterly useless. Adele and Rosalinde are the strong, main characters. That's obvious from the music."
Palm wants his vivid, lozenge-coloured Andy Warhol/David Hockney conception to communicate the themes of the work without any historicist distractions. He has written new, updated dialogue, to be spoken in English, while the singing will be in the original German, with sur-titles. "It's very important that people understand everything, so I'm totally in favour of sur-titles - even if the singing is in English. Hopefully we'll get some young people in to see this and they'll find out what pop music could be like in the 19th century."
Isn't there a danger that this 1960s visual conceit could overwhelm the work and be a glib distraction for the audience rather than a means of bringing them in to the spirit of the piece? "Absolutely not. I know the kind of imposition you are talking about, where the `concept' is an arbitrary choice of the director. I hate - really hate - to see directors raping a work in that way.
"What I'm doing is holding up a cultural mirror. The 1960s become the window through which we can look at the 1870s. The 1960s are the nearest reference point we have to the spirit of free love that Strauss is writing about, so to add this layer brings about a rich crossing of lines, which is always what I'm aiming for. "
The choice of Palm to direct this production builds on Opera Ireland's flourishing Austrian connections. This season's other offering, the traditional pairing of the much-loved Cavalleria Rusticana by Mascagni and I Pagliacci by Leoncavallo ("Cav and Pag"), will be directed by the company's artistic director, Dieter Kaige and designed (in 1950s Italian style) by his frequent collaborator, Bruno Schwengl. It was Schwengl who recommended Palm as a director, having seen his "unconventional" production of the Flaubert play, Le Sexe Faible in Austria.
Palm is now a regular visitor to Dublin, since his acclaimed and appropriately whacky film version of Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two Birds opened at the Dublin Film Festival earlier this year and has just had a release at the IFC. He has brought the film's talented design team, with whom he has collaborated for the past 12 years, to Die Fledermaus, and is undaunted by the challenge of moving from one art form to another, very different, one. "I have to keep doing different things, or else I go mad with boredom. So, I write scripts, I make TV shows, I produce theatre festivals, I play soccer. . . I never want to be only an opera director. I don't like specialists. I never want to get too serious about what I do, that's fatal for an artist." Johann Strauss would have applauded wholeheartedly.
Die Fledermaus opens at The Gaiety on Friday (in German with English sur-titles; I Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana (double- bill, in Italian with English sur-titles) opens on Saturday.