Amazonia was the product of a long research process involving going to Brazil, meeting artists and activists. How different is that from producing a normal play? 

It couldn’t be more different really. One way of producing a play is you look at your bookshelf and think:"Right what plays are on my shelf that I haven’t thought of doing and nobody’s done for a while?" And then you start with a very clear idea of what’s going to be at the heart of the production. But this sort of project starts with a hunch or an idea … perhaps a meeting, or a chance meeting, as it was in this case, and having a feeling about whether there is potential in a relationship. And then it’s constantly looking for mutual advantage, if we do this who else is it good for? Who else would take an interest? You are looking for colleagues people you could work with - directors, designers, actors, whatever it is. Amazonia has been very interesting in this respect because it’s happened in a number of different places. Like the work that we did in Rio Branco in the Amazon. It was genuinely collaborative. We wanted to learn from them. If we knew anything they want to know, we were very happy to share it, but principally we were going there thinking how do we learn.

Are there things you brought back with you?

That’s absolutely what I am saying… The premise one starts from is: "We want to learn". I suppose a lot of the impulse comes from a sense of wanting to live in the real world, and part of the process of being alive is constantly discovering that you don’t really understand what’s going on and you want to know a little bit more than you did last week and the realities of the way we live are so complicated, but as the last three months have made abundantly clear, we are allso living in each other’s pockets.A complex financial situation in downtown Miami can cause a collapse of the banks in Reykjavik. Now, what does that mean about the way we create work in the theatre?  So, the initial position is that I want to learn, you understand.

How much of this came from Young Vic director Paul Heritage’s personal passion with the country?

Very much. The project began when I met Paul for the first time, two-and-a-half years ago.  I was really following Paul and yes, absolutely, Paul’s personal passion for the work, for the people and probably for “the culture”, and was very much a driving force.

This can be seen as virtuous art -  art with a purpose beyond pure entertainment. Does that present peculiar difficulties?

Yes, it does, because, part of the job of producing is to try and control the way in which the audience receive what you are creating, by the context in which that is presented. If you are working in an area, like this Brazil project, which has a relationship to a set of ideas and arguments and actions about climate change, it is very, very, very hard, it is impossible, to control that context, because everybody comes at it with a set of their own ideas. I think many people have had assumptions about what it would be...

Yes...

... and I’m not sure that we’ve been as effective as we might have been in trying to be clear about what it is we have been trying to achieve,. My feeling is that a message with the smallest “m” that you can imagine needs to come out of the work itself,  but it's impossible to present work which has so much topical resonance without a lot of assumptions being present. So, yes, it is difficult and it is complex and I think we have learnt a lot and I’ve learnt a lot in doing the show.

It is obviously a massive preoccupation for us in RSA Arts and Ecology. Artists are obviously nervous about approaching the idea of "message". Is there anything in particular you have learned?

You know I think the thing I’ve learned? No, one of the things I’ve learned is patience [laughing]. I’ve been talking to David Buckland, whom you must know, and I am very, very interested in David’s approach, which is an incredibly radical thing, a sort of genius idea, but doing it with great tact. I don’t know whether David would sign up to this, but it seems to me what he is doing is that he is working to effectively expand the conversation.  I think that the effect that a whole range of artistic interventions to do with climate change have had has actually been huge but many of them have been quite subtle and gentle. rIt is sort of like joining the dots, and a figure begins to emerge.

You've got a training in social anthropology. Cultures can shift rapidly under crisis, but they are quite subtle machines, aren't they?

The power of continuity... Going to China was incredibly interesting in that way, and what I got more than anything else was the sense not of change but of continuity… their incredibly powerful ideas about the way people should live which have sustained them for (I don’t know enough about it but) but certainly for hundreds of years and through the most incredible turbulence, yeah absolutely, and yet, and yet…things change as well.

You must be incredibly disappointed with the critical reaction to the first week. I mean, those notices have been pretty horrible to sit through, I should imagine.

It’s not fun. One’s first responsibility is to the company who continue to perform the show - and to look after them, but um, I’m a little bit too close to it still to really understand it. I have to admit, I didn’t see this coming. Sometimes you produce a show and you go "look, this is not going to work."  But when that’s happened before, I’ve seen it coming.  This time I’m not quite clear yet why there has been this very strong response to it in that way. The audience is fine. We’ve just had a performance for schools this morning, and sitting in my office I can hear the response, and audiences are having a really good time. So quite why that’s happened and how that’s happened I don’t know, but we will, over the next couple of weeks, try and understand that. Of course it’s disappointing, on the other hand I hope we can take a sufficiently grown-up view and say maybe, well look, well… maybe the impact is a contribution to the discourse, to use a slightly pretentious term. I don’t know.

Do you think the critics are just wrong?

If they were, it wouldn’t be the first time. [laughing] But I’m too close to it at the moment.The last thing you want to do is make any sort of special pleading for a show. The show's got to stand on its own feet. But one of the things that I am trying to understand is, is the piece too weird? It is based reasonably closely on popular cultural form from Brazil. It's receiving very positive reviews from Brazillian newspapers. Did we not provide enough of a context for people to see what we were doing? I just don’t know yet…

Is there anybody from Brazil who's worked on this project has just blown you away or sort of taught the Young Vic a new way of doing things?

Yes, I mean, the designer...

Gringo Cardia...

I mean, he’s an absolutely brilliant guy and I hope we go on working with him. He's what you hope for - someone who has got an unusual aesthetic and a broadness of imagination. Brazil went straight from sort of Baroque to modernism with nothing in the middle and his sense of combining a slightly industrial asethetic with a very refined sense of decoration and colour  is very, very interesting.

OK, thanks very much for taking the time..

Good. Can I say, I mean we’ve been very grateful and pleased by the support you guys have given us with this whole project?

See what Amazonia's audience thinks of the show.