It's a perfect example of one word capturing the scene."To add to the heady mix, Broomhill is working in co-operation with the Spier Festival of South Africa, and the 34-strong cast is multicultural and multilingual. While the sung parts are in Bremner's English translation, his dialogue has been further translated into the cast's main mother-tongue, Xhosa "My Xhosa's very dodgy," he laughs "So I have no idea what they are saying. They could be saying, 'Rory Bremner's an arse'."Bremner is evangelical about working with the South African cast, many of whom have not appeared on stage before, or even sung an opera He describes the first rehearsal he attended. "The force of it! It was a bit like that cartoon image of a Rory-shaped space left in wet cement ... This is a company not worn out from previous usage, they have a freshness that is quite infectious. Carmen is a vehicle for a company that has not long been together ­ what you get is energy and spirit, spontaneity and enjoyment of a live performance.

That's the joy for the audience ­ you rediscover the opera as they discover it for the first time."This is the second off-the-wall Carmen that London will have seen in a few months ­ Matthew Bourne's reworking of it as a dance opera, Car Man, at the Old Vic late last year divided critics. "There's something I really don't like about opera lovers," admits Bremner "They are very possessive. They have an idea that there is a definitive performance of an opera, but I'm not sure that taste is defined by perfection, more by curiosity."Bremner knows his stuff, but declines to name his favourite opera, saying: "How can you possibly choose between geniuses? Look at what Puccini wrote ­ his facility for memorable arias is amazing And then Verdi for something darker But then there's Wagner, the Stephen Hawking of opera Boy, is The Ring deep. But a favourite opera, if I'm pushed, perhaps, oh, maybe, is [Richard Strauss's] Rosenkavalier."So converted to opera is Bremner that he is thinking of writing a libretto "I'd love to do that. Sometime in the future, but it's a different discipline and you have to ask what, if anything, do I have to say that's of interest to anyone.

At least with Carmen I know it already exists and has a validity. This is a raw Carmen ...You will not have heard this Carmen done anywhere ever before."'Carmen': Wilton's Music Hall, E1 (020-7420 0222), in rep to 29 June. Hunched over a microphone in the charcoal darkness of a crowded San Francisco club one night in April, Tricky is apparently oblivious to the 1,200 people who have come to watch him perform. Hunched over a microphone in the charcoal darkness of a crowded San Francisco club one night in April, Tricky is apparently oblivious to the 1,200 people who have come to watch him perform. With his bird-like frame turned away from the audience, the compulsive shaking, and a voice that bores into your soul like a pneumatic drill, the Bristol-born musical maverick is no Britney Spears. "I've forgotten the rest of the words," he mumbles at one point, breaking off a song midway.

Not that it matters: in a city that was moved to proclaim 2 December as "Tricky Day" in his honour, all he has to do is cough and the crowds scream. "I'm not a performer," he says, "and I'm not going to perform for people" (although he has agreed to take part in Robert Wyatt's Meltdown Festival this month). Yet his unabashed flirtations with different musical styles and subtly evolving personae put him up there with Madonna in the "whatever next?" stakes. His music has borrowed elements of everything from trip-hop and rap to rock and reggae, to the point where it defies description. "I'm a wannabe," says 34-year-old Tricky, splayed in the lounge of a San Francisco hotel, scruffy and alert as an alley-cat. "I'm not a rock artist or a hip-hop artist, but one minute I'll want to be a rock guy and the next I'll want to do hip-hop."His image, which veers from the white-frocked lady on Maxinquaye's album jacket to the tattooed hard-man of Juxtapose, is similarly fickle. "Right now I'm just me ­ no make-up, no anything," says the former Adrian Thaws, cheerfully ordering a breakfast of steak, boiled vegetables and grilled tomatoes and wishing his six-year-old daughter didn't have to go to school so she could tour with him.