David McVicar: Who are you calling the bad boy of opera?

David McVicar's 'in-your-face' reputation and uncompromising productions have upset traditionalists. But he's only being honest, he tells Anna Picard

The way David McVicar tells it, he can get "a bit feisty" during interviews. It is a process he hates, as he will tell you, should you ask him. Not that you'd need to. His folded arms, tight bottom-lip and wary eyes say it all. Perhaps consequently, the 36-year-old director who singers call an angel and opera companies eulogise has been described by journalists as "belligerent", "bilious", "sullen", fierce", "prickly", "glowering" and "withering" in print, and "a total nightmare" in private. Exactly the qualities you might expect from that great showbusiness cliché, the angry young man.

Angry young man is not the only epithet attached to McVicar, though anger is something he has worked hard to leave behind. Enfant terrible – a tag quite startlingly inappropriate for a director who generally eschews any knee-jerk neologisms – also crops up with surprising regularity. Is he a victim of his own mythology? Among the facts known about him are these: his childhood was violent and unhappy, his education uninspiring, his early productions ecstatically received. Among the fictions are a series of improbable affairs with high-profile artists, a rumoured stint as a sex-worker and that reputation for vitriol. Am I nervous? Yes. Not least because having somewhat stagily rejected the press officer's offer of a coffee from the chain next door to the Coliseum in favour of one from its rival at the far end of St Martin's Lane, McVicar begins with the question all interviewers secretly dread: "What do you want?"

It's a good, if blunt, question. We could discuss his production of Tosca (which continues its first run at ENO in March) or Die Zauberflöte (which opens at Covent Garden this month). We could talk about Camille at the Lyric, Hammersmith (his first straight theatre production for nearly a decade) or this summer's revival of his Glyndebourne Bohème. With so many productions, 2003 may be, as he puts it, "the year London will get sick of me." But the honest answer is that I simply want to know what he's like. "What do you think I'm like?" he fires back. I don't know, I say. And pop! We're off into why David McVicar hates interviews. "I just hate the results! I always find that what they write is so subjective and almost without fail they turn me into what they want me to be." Which is? "They want me to be an enfant terrible – which I'm not – and they just absolutely hammer me into that role." Why? "I think there's a kind of quasi-erotic thrill for them to... oh I can't say that. You know what most of the critics are like! First of all I'm Glaswegian and I'm not very middle-class and I didn't go to university – which is quite thrilling – and I'm openly gay and upfront about sex and my HIV-positive status." So you're opera's bit of rough? "Yes. There's a bit of fantasy going on. They fetishise me. I don't recognise myself and I find myself thinking 'did I really say that?'"

Almost without fail, the answer is yes, but he later tells me that he doesn't regret anything he has said. "I talk about having AIDS because I think people should talk about it. It should be normalised. Anyway, I made the decision to come out with it professionally because there was already gossip flying around about it all over the world. People were already speculating about why I'd spent so long in hospital and I just didn't want to give them that power. I wanted to take the power away from them and say 'Yes? What's your problem?'"

In an industry dominated by loquacious Oxbridge-educated sixtysomethings, David McVicar looks like your average Sho-Ho thirtysomething, swears frequently, and has said publicly that most opera productions bore him. No wonder the traditionalists get into such a stew. But what fails to come across in his more pugilistic soundbites is his charm, which, once he stops staring me down, is immense. He's funny and impassioned, argumentative and vulnerable, but also strikingly open for someone who claims he can't stand being interviewed. My impression is that he is far too smart for this on-going bad-boy image to be totally accidental. If he feels fetishised as rough trade in the silky-subtle world of elderly opera buffs, he plays on that persona; using it to disarm or deflect. So he doesn't speak like Muriel Spark? Neither is he Rab C Nesbitt. During our conversation, his accent has more of Milnegavie than the Gorbals, while his argot is a fluent composite of percussive Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, lush esoterics and psychoanalytical buzz-words. Camp – which he swears he is and I rather think he's not – is toned down, then intensified, then toned down again. (It is, he says, a "useful tool" for breaking tension in rehearsals.) Add a shape-changer's lexicon of physical attitudes to the auto-didact education and the chameleon voice and you have an entirely self-made man. Is he for real?

For what it's worth, my opinion is this: McVicar may be difficult to pigeon-hole but he's completely honest and very independent. "You try and not think about what other people will say. You work in reaction if you worry that 'Oh, we've got to do something different otherwise all the critics will say it's boring'. You have to free yourself from that and just try to be really, really honest. Which is what I always do. I try to give my absolutely honest reaction to the music. All these big warhorse pieces which everyone thinks they know and actually have almost forgotten what they're about, all we have is this awful accretion of tradition. Everyone thinks they know what Tosca should be like. They think she should be fiery, so you see divas playing 'the state of fiery'. But why is she so jealous? Why is she so convinced Mario has a lover in that church? Why? Well, obviously she's dreadfully insecure, so why is she insecure? Why is she so obsessed with this portrait with blonde hair and blue eyes? Maybe she's always wanted to have blonde hair and blue eyes. Maybe she doesn't think she's beautiful. Maybe she feels inadequate. Maybe Mario tells her she is. Maybe she's hardly literate. All great divas, what makes them behave like that is they're unbelievably insecure." Even the divas he's worked with? "Of course! Half of what I do is psychology, dealing with people's insecurities and helping them overcome them."

In an art-form besotted with misogynistic misconceptions of the female psyche, McVicar – who has not fought shy of graphic depictions of sexual assaults – has built a reputation as a "women's director"; patiently "teasing out" the bump and grind in Anne Sofie von Otter's Carmen and bringing sincerity and vulnerability to Cheryl Barker's radiant Tosca. "I have a lot of time for heroines," he says. "Did you see my Butterfly? I believed in her so much. Suicide is actually her ultimate act of strength. Personally and culturally she re-establishes herself. I think it's an apotheosis, her death. It's tragic but it's transcendentalist, if that's not too big a word. I really like Puccini's operas and I know he was a big womaniser but I think he genuinely adored women and understood their psyches and handled them really well. But I have a problem with Verdi's women which is why I don't do very much Verdi."

This includes La Traviata though McVicar's production of Camille, starring fellow Glaswegian Daniella Nardini, opens in March. "I loathe Traviata!" he cries. "I could never do such a coarse, clumsy reduction of this woman." The play, he says, has more complexity and more honesty than Verdi's operatic adaptation: "There are passages in the book that are so vivid! The way Dumas describes the way they meet – it's true! That's what she was like! She's trying to play the piano, she can't do it, she sits there and it's like 'Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck this fucking piano!' and everyone's shocked." She actually says that? "In our version she does. I thought, if you've never heard a woman say 'fuck' before, that is really important and I'm sure Marie did."

If a gritty four-letter Camille and a tense, visceral Tosca are obvious choices for McVicar, the surreal formality and steady grace of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte seems a less predictable project. Yet this is his favourite opera and he tells me he is "incredibly excited" about working with its septuagenarian conductor, Sir Colin Davis. "I said I would love to do a slow-paced, luminous reading of the score, and he said 'At my age, that's what you're going to bloody get!'" Die Zauberflöte was the first opera McVicar saw, aged nine: "I saw Ingmar Bergman's film on television. I think it's one of the most beautiful operas ever written. I think it's an opera which is about death. Mozart had a really humanistic, very un-Catholic attitude towards death. After his mother died, he said to his father, 'I now understand that all of life's trials are a preparation for death'. But he's not talking about an afterlife, he's talking about the value of life. This music is an incredible celebration of the complexity of life – of all it's joys and all the pain." Is he suggesting that Mozart knew he was dying when he wrote it? McVicar leans forward, "Yes. Yes." His voice drops to a whisper. "I'm sorry but I have to. Especially in this opera and the Requiem. I feel it."

When he saw the Bergman film, McVicar had no idea he was even watching an opera. "I thought it was just this nice fairy story movie!" he laughs. "But I still don't realise operas are operas." So what are they to you? "Shows!" he cries, "They're shows! There is in some circles a perceived wisdom that opera is somehow different. One elderly critic said that 'ultimately the important components of an opera are the singers and the conductor' and I thought 'OH! FUCK! OFF! How dare you?' When I do my job well, you don't even notice I've been there."

McVicar reads reviews avidly and can quote your clumsiest lines back at you, word-perfect. "I read fanatically and I'll tell you something; I don't mind bad reviews. What I mind is when people speculate on aspects of my personality. That annoys me. You can hate my work – that's fine. I might agree with you because I don't like everything I do. But don't speculate on what this means to me personally. Because as far as I know there are two me's: there's the me, the workplace me, in the opera world and then there's me, the private me, which nobody knows about, that has nothing to do with this business." But I wonder how true that is? I can accept that he's wise enough to refrain from using a production to cock a snook at the attitudes he dislikes in the industry but surely his own journey must influence the way he approaches his characters?

Prior to his epiphanal moment with Ingmar Bergman, there was nothing in McVicar's education or childhood to indicate an artistic career. Did he feel like a freak of nature? A changeling? "Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. All my childhood I basically felt unhappy because I felt I was in the wrong place. I felt I had a mission, I felt I had to do something, and I knew it had nothing to do with lower middle-class suburban Glasgow and going to a comprehensive school where the height of aspiration is to be an assistant bank manager." To compensate or escape, he became a voracious reader, lugging around an army surplus bag loaded with the classics. "I read Crime and Punishment when I was 14. All the heavy stuff, you know. Lots of religion. I was always fascinated by religion: eastern religions, wicka." Because the Church of Scotland is so dour? "No, because we had no religion whatsoever. I was quite hippy at school. And then Boy George happened and I became very tranny – jewellery and make up and all that stuff." What did your parents say? "They were very unhappy."

They were not the only ones. McVicar describes his family as "a strange collection of people" where no one fitted in. Despite having a large degree of professional success and a secure "non-sexual, family-type" domestic situation of his own now, McVicar says he has always felt alone. Is he happy, I ask. "No." he says quietly. Why? "I'm not happy because I don't love myself. I don't like myself enough yet. But I'm working on it." He smiles, briefly. "I'm working very very hard at it." Do you like yourself more than you used to? "Much more than I used to." And what would it take for you to really like yourself? "More affirmation than someone is willing to give," he laughs, "which is why I've been single for four years because every relationship I've ever had I've been so voracious for affirmation I've pissed the other person off." But you must get people trying to pick you up all the time! I say, blowing what little critical distance I have left from my sweet, bitter, bittersweet subject. "Yes, but they're all pigging ugly!" he shrieks, briefly camp. "It's not a good shag, opera. No." He raises one eyebrow: "I've heard that I have shagged a lot of opera singers. The stories I hear about myself are unbelievable! The people I'm meant to have had affairs with, I just go..." He shrugs and rolls his eyes. "I've never ever fancied an opera singer, I don't know why. Not even a really really handsome one. There's something about the fact that they can make that noise that I find incredibly unerotic. Isn't that strange?"

This loneliness, this singledom; does that go back to the unhappy childhood? "I'm sufficiently – what's the word? – 'therapised' and self-aware that I know what the root of my low self esteem is. I know what's going on and I know absolutely that what I have to do is cut myself off from the past. That's what I have to do to survive. You spend so many years being angry that it happened, but anger is a bad emotion. Anger is emotional stasis. You can't move forward with anger." And forgiveness? "Yes, I do believe in forgiveness." But doesn't that put too much responsibility on the victim? "Responsibility is a great thing. Shouldering responsibility is a great thing. I think that's how you get strong." And professionally? "You've got to ride the wave while it's there. You've got to be disciplined. You've got to get better all the time." And are you? "Yes," he breathes. "Yes. I am getting better."

'Die Zauberflöte': Royal Opera House, London WC2 (020 7304 4000) from 25 January to 17 February. 'Tosca': English National Opera, London WC2 (020 7632 8300) from March 10 to 17 April. 'Camille': Lyric Hammersmith, London W6 (020 8741 2311) from 6 March to 12 April