By rights, I should be suffering from déjà vu. Two years ago I sat down in a corner of the Coliseum to meet an opera director by the name of Christopher Alden, on the eve of his iconoclastic new production. Now it's happening all over again, with Christopher's identical and equally irreverent twin, David, whose staging of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor opens tomorrow.

Well, the room is the same. So is the mop of grey hair, the round specs and the cultivated New York twang. But, while his brother had locked me into a deadpan debate about opera's deep intellectual truths, David Alden bounces disarmingly from topic to topic, skittish and solemn in equal measure.

Perhaps any ensuing confusion is just my fault. “Critics especially can't deal with several strains at the same time,” he complains. “They can't deal with humour and seriousness being able to coexist.” Essentially, Alden directs operas the way he talks: flashes of penetrating insight flecked with wit and whimsy.

It's true that we haven't always lavished praise on these bipolar shows. A hard-hitting, unflinchingly direct Jenufa for English National Opera last year won the company an Olivier award, but a more sideways glance at Monteverdi's Return of Ulysses in Cardiff was described by The Times as “something that Benny Hill and Salvador Dalí might have knocked together over a few beers”.

Most recently, few warmed to his modern-dress production of Donna del Lago for Garsington Opera, which turned the opera's virile Scottish hero, Malcolm, into a studded, tartan Goth.

Lucia di Lammermoor, astonishingly getting its first performances at ENO, won't be pretty, either. Alden talks admiringly of Maria Callas's interpretation - “dark and psychologically minutely attuned, as well as musically beautiful”. But his heroine, here played by the promising young American soprano Anna Christy, will be different. “It's not a mature, romantic heroine, but a child-woman in that weird magical adolescent point where everything is possible.”

Although he's come up with a 19th-century setting, albeit a “grungy, rough environment”, Alden promises to bring the darkness out of Donizetti's tragic scenario, in which its haunted heroine is driven to madness and murder after she is forced to abandon her lover. “It's always been shocking to me” he says. “If you play it for exactly what it is, it's a fairly frightening sort of sadistic event - just the turning of the screw on this girl slowly through the night until she explodes and brings a terrible punishment on everybody.” A real horror story, then? “Yes,” he smiles, “I've thought of Carrie more than once.”

Anyone who remembers Alden's sensational London debut shouldn't be surprised. Back in the mid-1980s we were still blissfully ignorant of deconstructionist opera. Then came his 1985 staging of Tchaikovksy's Mazeppa, again for ENO. “Wild catcalls, screaming from the audience, amazing fights breaking out among the public - and somebody vomited in the chainsaw execution scene.” Alden smiles. “The battlelines were certainly drawn by then.”

So did a small part of this ambitious director welcome the fuss? “‘The controversy continues' - that was the catchphrase in the marketing,” he recalls. “And they kind of counted on that.” Did he mind? “PR is PR and it's exciting, it's amusing. But when I work on a show I don't really think of it in those terms. It's not about laying explosives underground, it's just about rehearsing.”

One thing you can't knock David Alden for is his deep musical knowledge. He goes into an opera fully immersed in the score; everything that follows, he says, comes directly from that. “That's my secret weapon in this war,” he laughs. “Singers are somewhat wary. They have their rather difficult job to do and they're somewhat guarded. So the best way to break down their guard is to do it all through the music.”

It's one reason why Alden has been critical of the influx of film and theatre directors into opera houses (self-preservation may be another). “I'm for anything in opera where you're trying to break down boundaries, get new ideas and look for new audiences. It's just that when you have people who've never done this before, the possible percentage of success is definitely less than if you have someone who knows what they're doing.”

Terror and darkness certainly loom through Alden's work; where all that angst came from seems less clear. The Alden frères grew up immersed in the world of New York theatre, ballet and opera - their father was a playwright and their mother a dancer. “We knew right away that we were going to do opera, but we also knew immediately that the way we were going to do it was not the way we were seeing it.”

So the twins struck a kind of deal. “It sort of happened that Christopher took America and I took Europe first. There used to be usually at least an ocean between us, if not a continent and an ocean, but lately he [Christopher] has been coming here more and more - it's become quite daring of him.”

As usual, Alden is only half-serious, but he gives a more daring response to the question of sibling rivalry than his brother did two years ago. Christopher told me they were “very friendly and amiable competitors”; David confesses that he was shocked by the “freudian drama” of his brother's recent production of Il trovatore - an opera about two brothers who also happen to be mortal foes. “There's bound to be a hidden enmity when two twins are doing the same thing - even if you carved the world up between the two of you.”

By a whisker, David is probably still in pole position. And next season he'll finally make his Royal Opera debut, with his production of Cavalli's Baroque comedy La Calisto. Will he sober up for the benefit of Covent Garden's patrons? “I'm curious to see what's going to happen,” he grins. “Undoubtedly there's going to be a furore about it, but it's a very good-natured production. It's a riotous sex-comedy production of a riotous sex comedy. I mean, what are you going to do?”

Lucia di Lammermoor opens at the Coliseum (0870 1450200) on Feb 16

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