Jude Kelly, Artistic Director of the Southbank

talks to Anthony Gardner

'There's a little bit of Carmen Jones in all women,' declares the publicity for the Royal Festival Hall's revival of Carmen Jones. If this is true of Jude Kelly, it is not immediately apparent where. She does not sing lustily at every opportunity; she is blonde rather than raven-tressed; she wears jeans, a T-shirt, gym shoes and a combat-style jacket in preference to high heels and a scarlet halter-neck dress. Above all, she seems too wedded to the principle of organisation to foment the kind of mayhem which follows Bizet and Hammerstein's archetypal femme fatale. But Kelly is certainly, like Carmen, a force to be reckoned with - for how many other people would have chosen to direct a musical in London at the same time as a new play in Manchester (Jimmy McGovern's King Cotton, which opens in mid-September) on top of a day job as artistic director of the entire Southbank Centre? This is not to mention her membership of the European Cultural Parliament, the board of the British Council, and the organising committee for the 2012 Olympics, whose artistic dimension she is responsible for.

'It's just the sort of person I am,' she says simply. 'I'm an enthusiast. If you are healthy enough to do lots of things because you like doing them, then that's just lucky, isn't it?

She likes doing musicals, she explains, 'because to get that combination of book, music, and a real psychological story which also has visual potency is very hard to achieve. When I was growing up there were some very influential, semi-political musicals like West Side Story, South Pacific, Carousel - and Carmen Jones - which were really powerful in terms of understanding more about the world. I had great respect for them as a child - everyone did; so it was a shock to later discover that musicals were considered to be lower down the intellectual pecking order than plays.

'In America the musical has always been used as a way of charting the history of the country, but British musicals have never done that. All Lloyd Webber's stuff, or what Cameron Mackintosh has produced - in general it's fantasy or another country's story: it isn't about the psyche of the nation; so I can see why the form isn't as admired here as I think it should be. But I like great musicals because I love music - like poetry, it's a shorthand for very strong emotions - and they're very cathartic: they tend to move towards very tragic moments, and even if the tragedy then gets resolved through a happy ending, it's a big journey.'

For Kelly, the arts have gone hand in hand with politics ever since she was a schoolgirl growing up in Liverpool in the Sixties. 'I don't think the arts are a decorative extra,' she says. 'I think that culture is as important as education was 100 years ago. It's a fundamental part of civilisation.' This concept, she maintains, was also at the heart of the event which established the South Bank as a modern venue for the arts, the Festival of Britain - and she sees it as her mission to take the Centre back to the principles of that festival.

'Although I wasn't born in '51, the idea of coming back after the War to create a new society around welfare, education and a commitment to the arts is to me the most inspiring thing. The Festival of Britain was a sort of resurrection of the nation: an unashamed commitment to pleasure and joy, as well as a very stringent commitment to aesthetics. There were 27 acres devoted to the imagination, and if you look at what the festival achieved, it was all the things we talk about now in terms of access and excellence.' The dismantling of most of the Festival's structures was, she believes, 'an act of petulance' by an incoming Conservative government still bitter at its rejection by the electorate in 1945.

And now she is a politician of a sort herself, though she describes the European Cultural Parliament as 'a very loosely defined notion of a Parliament…it's more of a persuasive forum.' What its members and senators share, she says, is the belief that culture is of paramount importance both as a human right and as a means of breaking down barriers: the challenge now is to get mainstream politicians to recognise the changes that culture can bring about. 'Take the Divan Orchestra which Daniel Barenboim runs: it does a huge amount of good both for its members and for the communities they come from. There are lots of examples like that, of short-term and long-term projects, which I think if Europe committed to and funded would take us forward a lot more quickly than some of the more cerebral forums or conferences.'

She regrets the fact that - despite the symbolic proximity of the Southbank Centre to the Eurostar terminal at Waterloo - Britain remains to some extent culturally isolated from the Continent: 'I wish that we could swap ideas with the same ease as other countries. I think that the fact of being an island gives us great creative strengths, but we need more viruses of the intellect, more cultural exchange.'

London, does, however, have the advantage of being the meeting place par excellence for different nationalities. There is, Kelly argues, a particular vibrancy and humour which comes from 'people are having to rub along with others they're not used to' - and she would like to encapsulate this at the Southbank Centre: 'If arts institutions had some of the energy of the streets, that would be great.' Indeed, she feels that multiculturalism is the way forward for Europe as a whole: 'The classical European literary culture still exists, but I think it's morphing into another ways of thinking and other ways of expressing things. There was this anxiety that everything would get Americanised, but I feel that that isn't happening - people are digging deeper.'

What, then, of Carmen Jones? There is no escaping the fact that Kelly's own reputation as a director has been built largely on musicals from across the Atlantic - most notably her Olivier Award-winning Singin' In the Rain and the ENO's triumphant On the Town. 'I think what British theatre has been trying to do in the last twenty years is take on some of the best qualities of European theatre in terms of ensemble work and physicality,' she says. 'But the big influence in terms of musicals has been America. It's a bit like foreign policy - there's a populism that leans towards America, and a intellectual rigour that leans towards Europe. We're just very lucky here to be able to mix and match.'

© Anthony Gardner. All views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to the European Commission.