‘I want every production I do to be the funniest’: an interview with Cal McCrystal

There are certain things that you don’t expect at the opera. Laughter, for example. Proper laughter, that is; not the knowing sort that ripples politely across the auditorium five seconds after the punchline appears in the surtitles. We’re talking unconstrained laughter; laughter that gives you an endorphin rush and sends you straight online to tell your friends that they must see the show.

But that’s Cal McCrystal’s whole business. He’s the director who devised James Corden’s delirious plate-spinning capers in the National Theatre’s One Man, Two Guvnors and whose face (in motion-capture) provided the elastic expressions of a small Peruvian bear in Paddington.

McCrystal is the king of the sight-gag and the pratfall: a virtuoso creator of physical comedy whose credits range from Cirque du Soleil to The Mighty Boosh and whose sudden, glorious swerve into comic opera over the past few years hasn’t so much blown fresh air through the genre as, well, smashed onstage and seen him start hurling things about. And now, somehow, he’s at Glyndebourne, and about to open a new production of Lehar’s The Merry Widow. How on earth did that happen?

‘When I was at the National Theatre, someone said, “Have you ever thought of doing opera?”’ says McCrystal. ‘I went, “Good heavens, no. Who’s going to give me an opera?” In 2014, English Touring Opera gave me Haydn’s Il mondo della luna, and it did very well, and people absolutely loved it. But when English National Opera offered me a Gilbert and Sullivan, I don’t think they even knew that I’d done an opera before.’

Soon everyone knew it: McCrystal’s 2018 staging of Iolanthe might have been the most gleeful, game-changing take on Gilbert and Sullivan since Jonathan Miller gave The Mikado an art deco makeover in 1987.