Tim Albery doesn’t beat about the bush. “What is the purpose of this interview?” he asks as we sit down to lunch. “Is it about Boris? Is it about life and death?” Gosh. Skip the soup, I’ll have a vodka.

Mussorgsky’s best-known opera, Boris Godunov, has clearly struck a nerve with Albery, who is directing the original, seven-scene, 1869 version — punchy and direct, before Rimsky-Korsakov revised it into an operatic blow-out. With Edward Gardner in the pit, this English National Opera production will be performed straight through, with no interval.

“It’s an emotionally and musically cogent tornado of an event that goes: ‘Aaargghh!’ ” says Albery, with a violent strangling action. “Mussorgsky didn’t know the rules for grand 19th-century opera so he just wrote what he felt.”

Godunov, the subject of Pushkin’s novel, was a real 16th-century Tsar suspected of murdering the child Tsarevich Dimitri, before accepting the crown for himself. Nobody can say if he did murder the young pretender, but in both fact and fiction Boris died pleading for forgiveness, consumed by guilt and suspicion.

Mussorgsky’s opera meanders through distant subplots, dream sequences, hallucinations and the ambitions of five actual or would-be tsars. “All these stories connect thematically, but in terms of a conventional plot — which we expect from a well-made piece — there isn’t one,” Albery says. “The opera describes chaos, which is why the plot doesn’t add up to anything.”

This sounds like a directorial nightmare, but not so. “There’s something rather tiresome about plays and operas that are perfectly worked-out machines,” Albery says. “They don’t bear much resemblance to how life is.” Boris Godunov taps into themes and cycles that remain startlingly pertinent 140 years later — not only in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. “The way Mussorgsky looked at politics was: there isn’t a plot. Politics and the way society has changed is a random mixture of interlocking things. Just think,” he adds, “Peter Mandelson is back in government and no one would ever have guessed that.”

A Russian tyrant with a line in passing off heinous crimes for the greater good . . . was there a temptation to update the work to Putin and his oligarchs? After all, Albery successfully set Wagner’s Ring cycle, for Scottish Opera in 2003, in Blair’s Britain. But no, this Godunov is timeless. Boris and his court of boyars are dressed in the time of Mussorgsky, yet the coronation takes place in the 16th century, Boris’s own era. Meanwhile, the chorus, which plays the Russian people, is dressed vaguely 20th century — any time, any place peasants.

“Part of the message is, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s Putin,” Albery says. “It doesn’t matter who it is. This is a grinding cycle of history.” After Boris’s coronation, we see Pimen, the monk who accuses him of murder, writing a history of Russia. His aria, Albery believes, is about the terrible relentlessness of the mother country’s fate.

“There are moments when autocracy might be broken, when you see a notion of democracy lurking in the distance, but it’s always crushed by the next person.”

Incredibly, Boris appears in only two major scenes, though his presence permeates the opera. Filling these big Tartar boots is the British bass Peter Rose, singing his first title role. He and Albery have worked together before, on Opera North’s The Trojans in 1986 (“Peter was the ghost of Hector. You could tell vocally he was going places.”) and again when Rose sang Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the New York Met.

“There’s not much comedy in Boris,” Rose begins, smiling with very untyrannical dimples. “But from desperation to exaltation to jubilation you do quite the gamut of emotions. That’s the challenge and the excitement.”

Rose hopes to convey the ambiguity of Boris, leaving the audience to decide if he is madman, monster or misunderstood. “That’s not a cop-out,” he argues. “It’s part of the exploration. I’ve seen lots of Borises but the first time you come with no preconceived ideas. It’s like arriving at a roundabout and having five different exits and hopefully being able to go off at any one of them and make a convincing case.”

Another Mussorgsky piece, Salammbô (based on a Flaubert novel), was the first opera Albery tried to stage, for Birmingham City Opera. At the last minute the piece fell foul over rights. Since then he has made a British home for himself at Opera North, the first UK company to gave him a stab at directing opera — Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage, in 1985. He has staged four operas for them in the past few seasons and is planning more, praising their adventurous repertoire. First, however, comes a Nabucco in the Netherlands and then Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer at Covent Garden in February.

Seven years have passed since Albery’s last appearance at ENO, directing another Russian epic, Prokofiev’s War and Peace, at about the time ENO itself was battling on financial and critical fronts. “I haven’t worked at ENO for quite a bit because there have been a few managements since and it’s quite natural that new managements want to make their own stamp or bring in different people,” Albery says, carefully. “So it’s a cyclical thing.” Those old Mussorgsky cycles again.

Boris Godunov, ENO, London Coliseum (www.eno.org 0871 9110200), from Nov 10 2008

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