Richard Jones is quite the conundrum. Don’t call him tricksy. “Trick” is not a Jones word; it reduces the director’s sophisticated ideas to whimsies and jokes. But quirky is OK. Don’t call him ironic, and certainly not an iconoclast. “That label hangs around my neck like an albatross,” explains the director famed for inflating latex Rhinemaidens in Wagner’s Ring cycle. “Every article ever written makes me out to be some kind of agent provocateur . . . a vandal.”

We meet while Jones is rehearsing his first Cav & Pag – Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci – the classic opera double bill, for ENO. Jones’s Cav, newly translated by the poet Sean O’Brien, is set in 1930s Italy. His Pag, the more interesting, hot-blooded of the two, with its play within a play, is a new adaptation, written by Lee Hall of Billy Elliot fame.

Instead of Sicily, watching a clown troupe, we’re in Sunderland, circa 1979, “in the death throes of Bernard Manning, Cannon and Ball – that bargain basement, comic world”. Canio, Leoncavallo’s antihero, becomes Kenny Evans; the jilted Tonio is Tony O’Sullivan. The doomed lover Nedda is Nelly Scrimshaw. The opera’s play is in the style of No Sex Please, We’re British, the 1970s romp.

For Jones, witty and likeable in person, the era’s warm humouris an obvious fit. Tonio, for instance, addresses the audience directly in the prologue. “It wouldn’t dovetail with today’s brittle, sophisticated comics,” he points out. (Famously taciturn when talking about himself, Jones could yak about comedy for hours. He loves the Mighty Boosh; rates Kevin Bishop as “brilliant but cold”.)

“Pagliacci makes me think of the death of Tommy Cooper on stage. He actually dies but the audience thinks it’s very funny. That has resonances of Leoncavallo.” During the players’ drama Canio kills Nedda and her lover, Silvio. “Something goes horribly wrong but people don’t know.”

Jones, 55, is indulging in shameless nostalgia. He once worked as a stagehand at the Victoria Palace Theatre on Singalonga Max (Bygraves) and Carry on London. “I’ve never been happier,” he says, enthusing about dancing girls and “getting a packet of Embassy for Max”.

He’s having fun with Pag, though Cav is more straightforward. “One’s a conductor’s piece and the other’s a director’s.” So while Cav has better music, Pag has the action. “The theatrical situations are poky. The action does afford the opportunity to play with cliché.” Twenty-six years after he started at Scottish Opera, Jones is the toast of the opera establishment. Sadly success means that people start to question whether he hasn’t become a cliché himself – the director who can’t resist an ironic trick. His Macbeth at Glyndebourne in 2007 had pop-up axes and smiley Ecstasy tabs.

Jones is self-deprecating and unwilling to indulge in self-important explanations of his own imagery. Those Macbeth smiley faces were plucked from the cover of Gordon Burn’s book about Rose and Fred West, Happy Like Murderers, exploring how violence tipped over into the banal. As for the T-Rex he famously stuck on stage in Giulio Cesare in 1994 – to the dismay of Sir Charles Mackerras, who refused to conduct – that was the dead king looming over Caesar. It was ironic, Jones says.

“And irony is richer than jokes.” So he does like irony – to a degree. “I use irony where it’s appropriate, if it alerts people to the music. I couldn’t have a career if I was a one-trick pony.”

To his credit, Jones doesn’t pull the “misunderstood director” trick. He acknowledges that his ironic or absurd takes have sometimes flipped characters into 2-D cartoons and in his words, “then some audience members disconnect”. With Macbeth, some people were moved while others “couldn’t relate to it at all”.

Jones returns to Glyndebourne next year, to direct Falstaff, hinting that it will be “very honeyed and sweet”. Next year brings his first operetta, when he stages Armando Iannucci and the composer David Sawer’s plastic surgery satire, Skin Deep, for Opera North. Will we see the electric perfection of Jones’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the charm of his L’ heure espagnoleand Gianni Schicchi double bill? Or the quirky Jones of scratch and sniff cards handed to the audience in Prokofiev’s The Love For Three Oranges? One thing’s certain; whatever he chooses is sure to add to the Jones conundrum.

Cavalleria rusticana and I Pagliacci, ENO, the Coliseum, London WC2 (www.eno.org 0871 9110200), from Sept 20 2008

Editor's choice

• Guns N’Roses: Chinese Democracy
• The 50 Biggest Movies of 2009
• Quantum of Solace