THE LAST time director Bill Bankes-Jones worked with Scottish Opera it was for the 2012 production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, in his own translation. The company’s Pagliacci, which opens in the new “Paisley Opera House”, a tented structure in Seedhill Community Sports Ground, on Thursday, also has a Bankes-Jones libretto, but there any resemblance pretty much ends.

Leoncavallo’s opera is a tricky beast at the best of times, a multi-layered examination of the whole business of “performance” that is perhaps, in that respect, a distant cousin of Kiss Me, Kate, which Opera North brought to Edinburgh recently. To the multi-faceted play-within-a-play structure that Pagliacci already is, the new Scottish Opera production adds further layers of its own, so that it will be very difficult to tell where the audience stops and the performers start.

To say that Bankes-Jones has form in this sort of thing is an understatement. The founder of Tete-a-Tete Opera, whose own festival in London is starting at exactly the same time as Pagliacci opens, is the go-to guy, but these days chooses to limit the number of shows he takes on that use those skills.

“If we have done our job right, you will go in and it will just start happening around you,” he says. “There are very few places that the singers go that the audience don’t go. A joyous consequence of the layers of reality in the opera is that the chorus play the role of an audience, so there is no difference between the actual audience and the chorus really.

“I have done a lot of shows with different levels of interactive-ness. The difference here is in scale and the profile of the company and its infrastructure. If we get it right, the people who may be affected most by the experience are the Scottish Opera staff and myself. Anybody who is open to letting it recharge them will get that. There such a good feeling of mutual support in rehearsals, it’s magic.”

When I chat to a couple of the community chorus members, they, unprompted, endorse that view.

Ronnie Lamont and Kathy O’Donnell both took part in The Witches at Paisley Abbey last year, he returning to singing after some years resting his tenor voice, and she a newcomer to opera and now an enthusiastic evangelist.

O’Donnell says: “It is so exciting – I think it will be a fantastic production. But it is scary; I’ve never done anything like this before. The Witches project was more structured and safer. In this, anything can happen. I come back from every rehearsal on a high. It is that kind of a buzz.”

Lamont explains: “When the audience come in, they won’t know who is in the audience until we start singing. What we have to do is take someone from the audience and lead them in.”

Both are fired up about the opportunity to raise their game in the company of professional singers, and when I am roped into rehearsals later, playing the part of a paying punter, I can see how the whole show will become an immersive experience.

Tete-a-Tete, where Scottish Opera’s Stuart Stratford was music director for four years at the start of the millennium, began with a Bankes-Jones production of Die Fledermaus:

“It started as a very traditional production in a small studio and then in the first interval, while the audience was having a drink, we took the chairs away. When they came back in they were announced as arrivals at Prince Orlofsky’s party and handed a glass of champagne.”

The company’s Salad Days, which ran for many performances, had the whole audience dancing with the cast and a Bankes-Jones Carmen in Blackheath had a community cast of 650. Tete-a-Tete’s Westminster Abbey staging of Benjamin Britten’s Canticles, working with people from five homeless shelters, gave birth to Streetwise Opera that now does superb work all over the world.

“That was more like this in a way,” says Bankes-Jones, “in that Westminster Abbey was almost as big as this tent, and it was similar in the way one had to use the space.”

The director began working with performers in this way after he had left his Wiltshire home to study at St Andrews. (“I thought I’d go to university as far away from where I grew up as possible, and I arrived at St Andrews and found all the people I’d been at school with,” he says, not entirely joking.)

He adapted the Mervyn Peake Gormenghast novel Titus Groan for a student production at Edinburgh College of Art.

“It was a promenade production, although I had never been to one, so I had to invent the rules, and I didn’t copy anything. My way through it was to make sure that there was a very strong sense of the company looking after the audience, so there was no sense of compulsion.”

What grew from that for Bankes-Jones makes working on Pagliacci feel like a sort of homecoming for the director, much more than directing Hansel and Gretel did.

“For three years I was chairman of the Scottish Student Drama Festival and then I ran the Scottish National Association of Youth Theatre. So I became embedded in community work and there is something here about re-coupling that with my parallel professional experience in opera.”

“I was doing a very extreme piece in Edinburgh with Jimmy Boyle involving ex-prisoners, people with drug issues, and people with Aids and I hit a point where I was conscious that I was telling people what to do without having a proper grounding. So I got a job at the National Theatre in London as an assistant and did the ITV Regional Theatre Young Directors Scheme and then I ended up at English National Opera. I needed the security of some credentials.”

As Bankes-Jones points out, once he started doing opera – and he was a staff director at ENO – the opportunities to do theatre disappeared because the timescales involved in the two are so different, opera schedules being planned years ahead, while drama is much more last-minute by comparison.

“And I did so much community work at the start of my career that I try to ration it now and only do projects that trigger something, like starting Streetwise Opera or this show. I don’t really want to do it all the time, because that keeps you fresh.”

His other work is sometimes on a much smaller scale, but no less conventional. It has included pop-up opera for Aberdeen’s Sound Festival with performances at the Mercat Cross, the harbour and in a churchyard, while in London there have been slices of new opera served in a bandstand in the middle of the road. “They have been very interesting, because if you do something that no-one realises is new opera all the problems associated with performances of new music just disappear.”

Something similar was happening at the rehearsals for Pagliacci.

“It is a bit of a gift that I am doing this with Scottish Opera, because people will think it is something that it isn’t. But at the same time it assures a certain level of quality in delivery. Working with a professional orchestra is a joy, not a problem, and they exist on another level of reality anyway. That’s just how they are. And it will sound incredible. The chance to potter around and hear them from different angles is going to be amazing.

“I feel like we are doing something completely off the wall with absolute confidence. People here feel they are in something that is pretty daring and unprecedented. And where it is a little bit out of control that is good thing!”

Pagliacci is at Paisley Opera House in Seedhill Community Sports Ground on July 26 and 28 at 7pm and July 29 at 3pm. scottishopera.org.uk