Since British stage director Stephen Lawless conceived his production of Giuseppe Verdi's "Il Trovatore" for LA Opera nine years ago, it's been met by critics worldwide with both raves and jeers.

The dark, fast-paced staging -- which debuts Saturday with the San Diego Opera -- is definitely different from most operatic productions seen in San Diego. Call it abstract, call it modernistic, call it what you will, Lawless promises it will be anything but dull.

"You're not going to see a lot of people standing around holding swords," Lawless said before a rehearsal last week. "It's a very physical production for the people involved. This is like the WWF (World Wrestling Federation). They wrestle with each other and it's very physical. It's a tricky production technically, because there's endless movement of these burnt black walls that make up the set."

Lawless said he likes opera productions where the stagecraft doesn't get in the way of the music. Unfortunately that happens often when opera companies stage epic operas with large-cast scenes in town squares, castles and cathedrals (like "Il Trovatore"). The time required to change the sets drags the evening out, and the audience eventually loses interest.

So, Lawless (with set designer Benoit Dugardyn) did away with the faux castle and cathedral sets for "Il Trovatore" and instead created tall, dark panels that move and shift in an ever-changing pattern to suggest new locales. The result is a swift-moving production that keeps the focus on the opera itself, which Lawless calls a masterpiece.

"It's a very precise intellectual drama for me," Lawless said. "Verdi was the great 19th century ironist. He was inspired by the irony and fluidity in Shakespeare's plays, and 'Il Trovatore' is a very complex piece that Verdi wrote with incredible economy. It has a reputation as being slow and creaky but it's incredibly fast. We didn't want to stop for these endless scene changes because I wanted it to have the same Shakespearean fluidity in it that Verdi loved."

Del Mar-raised mezzo-soprano Priti Gandhi, who plays the role of Inez in San Diego Opera's production, said that she's excited about Lawless' interpretation of Verdi's opera.

"I really love what he's doing," Gandhi said last week. "He's bringing a lot of new ideas that I find really interesting and refreshing. I'm excited about it and I think it's going to work really well."

"Il Trovatore," written during Giuseppe Verdi's productive "second period" (it came 14 months after "Rigoletto" and two months before the premiere of "La Traviata" in Venice), was a hit from the night it debuted in Rome 154 years ago.

Adapted by Verdi from Antonio Garcia Gutierrez's play "El Trovador," it tells the intertwining stories of a civil war in 15th century Spain, a Gypsy's curse and a tragic love triangle. Halfway through its composition, Verdi's aged librettist, Salvatore Cammarano, died, and the book was completed by Leone Emanuele Bardare. Perhaps that's one reason the storyline has been described by critics as hopelessly confusing. Much of the opera's dramatic action occurs offstage and in the past, and major plot points are told through sung monologues.

In "Il Trovatore" (Italian for "The Troubadour"), a Gypsy is burned at the stake for placing a curse on the youngest son of the ruling Spanish Count. Seeking revenge for her mother's death, the Gypsy's daughter, Azucena, kidnaps the Count's infant with the intention of throwing the baby into the pyre. Although nobody ever sees the act, a baby's charred bones are later discovered among the ashes. Darkening the plot further, Azucena later reveals that in a state of mad confusion she threw her own son into the flames.

The action shifts ahead 15 years, when the country is embroiled in civil war. The Count's other son, Count di Luna, is in love with the noblewoman Leonora, but her heart belongs to a mysterious troubadour, Manrico, who comes to sing at her window each night. Jealous of Manrico and angry to learn that Manrico is allied with the rebels, the Count di Luna pledges to capture and kill the troubadour. But the strange force of a Gypsy's long-forgotten curse intertwines the men's destinies and leads to the opera's tragic conclusion.

"Il Trovatore" is best known for the famed "anvil chorus," sung by the Gypsies as they melodically pound on anvils; Leonora's love cavatina to Manrico, "taccea la notte"; and Manrico's stirring (and high-note-packed) cabaletta "Di quella pira," in which he whips his troops into a warlike frenzy.

Lawless said that when he directs any opera production, he tries to find a central image to guide him. For "Il Trovatore," that image was the sword. "In this opera, everybody is always talking about swords -- dying by the sword, swearing on the sword, or being pierced by it," said Lawless, whose staging concept includes a field of swords in the first act.

Directing operas is all Lawless ever wanted to do. Raised in a small town near Stratford Upon Avon, Lawless remembers hearing opera on the family radio and attending Shakespeare plays as a boy (where he saw a young Judi Dench in "Twelfth Night"). Lawless said he was intrigued by theater but even more by the idea that "there was someone manipulating things behind the scenes, and I wanted to do that, but with opera."

With the help of renowned British opera director John Copley, Lawless worked as a stage manager for the London Opera Center, then spent many years serving as an assistant director at the Glyndebourne Center and Covent Garden. Eventually he began directing his own productions, and he ran the Glyndebourne Touring Opera from 1986-1991. Since then, he has directed internationally, including helming "Boris Gudunov" for Kirov Opera in Leningrad, "Don Giovanni" for the Metropolitan Opera, and engagements at L.A. Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Vienna Staatsoper, Teatro La Fenice in Venice, Berlin Staatsoper and much more.

Lawless said his role as an opera director is to dig beneath the surface and analyze the score to find the clues the composer left behind.

"Decoding the composer's intention, that's my job," he said. "My job is interpretive, just as a conductor's job is to interpret tempi and nuance. Very often there's a contradiction between the words and the music. What you have to decide is how you make that distinction work. I think that's the fascinating part of it for me."

Whether it's an abstract "Il Trovatore" for San Diego Opera or a traditional "Don Giovanni" at the Met, Lawless said his goal is to find a fresh and honest approach to the music. "It doesn't matter if it's traditional or avant-garde, the goal is to expose the piece in an interesting way."

And even though this will be the ninth time his "Il Trovatore" production has been presented worldwide (the sets arrived in San Diego two weeks ago from a production in Tel Aviv), Lawless said he likes to bring new ideas to every staging.

The San Diego Opera production features Italian soprano Paoletta Marrocu as Leonore, Argentinian tenor Dario Volonte as Manrico (replacing Italian tenor Nicole Rossi Giordano, who withdrew early this month for health reasons), American mezzo-soprano Marianne Cornetti as Azucena and Romanian baritone Alexandru Agache as Count Di Luna. Italian conductor Edoardo Muller returns to lead the San Diego Symphony in the pit.

Lawless said the cast assembled in San Diego is perhaps the best cast, across the board, that he's ever seen assembled for his "Il Trovatore" production.

"It's really the best I've seen anywhere," Lawless said. "And I'm having a great time in San Diego. What a great town and good company with a great, great chorus. It's going to be a very good show."

"Il Trovatore"

When: 7 p.m. March 24, March 27 and April 4; 8 p.m. March 30; 2 p.m. April 1

Where: San Diego Civic Theatre, Third Avenue at B Street, San Diego

Tickets: $27-$152 ($182 top ticket price on opening night)

Info: (619) 533-7000

Web: www.sdopera.com