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Platform makes several allusions to music, but, though Bieito may retain something of Bob Dylan's influence, he's not planning on including any tracks from Houellebecq's own album, Pr?nce Humaine. "The shattering of Michel's dreams is so strong, so lyrical, that nothing except the words themselves could do justice to the events that take place," he says.The stage version may take its theatrical form from Bieito but every word will be Houellebecq's, drawing on several of the writer's published poems as well as the novel. This plunges Michel into despair far greater than anything he'd ever experienced. The ending is incendiary "in a Shakespearian way", according to Bieito, who promised something suitably explosive, though not an explosion. The book tells of a disillusioned young bachelor and civil servant, Michel, who seeks sexual and personal fulfilment in the fleshpots of Bangkok. When he meets Valerie, a younger woman involved in the travel industry, he finds love as well as satisfaction for his sexual cravings.

Together, they establish a hedonistic sex resort for tourists.Michel may be an enigma - "possibly for a woman", laughs Bieito - but he himself readily admits to identifying with him - though not totally, he hastens to add. "Michel is remarkable for his mediocrity, and for his cheap fantasies. I love the character."On the very first of these holidays in Thailand, in which casual sex is openly tossed into the package, Islamic terrorists bomb a hotel. Brian recognised immediately that it was 'the perfect material' on which I would enjoy basing a show. I don't know what kind of show, actually."At first, I wonder if he's having me on.

After all, this is the director whose sensationally visceral productions attract capacity audiences and many column inches. An image sticks in my mind of Hasko Baumann's documentary of a meeting between the slightly shifty-looking, anorak-clad Houellebecq and the irrepressible Bieito. At one point in this short, uneventful film, Into the Night with..., an evening-suited man is seen running from a theatre performance, retching into the night.Bieito really rates Platform as a story and not just because you can read it "in a couple of hours". On the other, there's the Catalan director Calixto Bieito, whose notoriously over-imaginative productions frequently veer towards the sensational, the depraved and the plain silly. So, in offering to adapt and translate Platform as a special parting gift for Brian McMaster as he bows out of running the Edinburgh Festival, is Bieito planning his most inflammatory show yet? "I'm not interested in provocation. I keep saying that, but there are some people who don't want to believe me," declares Bieito, a touch disingenuously. On the one hand, there's the French novelist Michel Houellebecq, whose third novel, Platform, produced a scandale litt?ire, attracted an action against the author accusing him of inciting racial hatred, and aroused the ire of those who found it difficult to accept his detailed sex scenes as anything other than pornographic.

It seems like a marriage made in heaven. "This was nothing."Once a top venue for cabaret and concerts in the decadent Berlin of the 1920s and 1930s, it had been closed since 1997.Campino, the singer for the German rock band Die Toten Hosen, said he was not contemplating switching careers.. While the German rock star Campino, who stars as Mack the Knife, was cheered, there were also scattered boos for the conventional staging of the production. Some at Friday's premiere apparently found it too conventional, and there were boos after the curtain for Brandauer when he took his bow. "When one is opening a new house, like the one here, you've got to have an idea of how to stage Brecht," said the German actor Peter Lohmeyer, one of 1,700 people in the audience at the newly restored Admiralspalast theatre. His curious programme ranged from the baroque to rare Russian repertory, ending with some Liszt that blew the roof off.

Just what you need for a lazy summer Sunday afternoon.BBC Proms to 9 September (020-7589 8212; www.bbc.co.uk/proms). Klaus Maria Brandauer's eagerly awaited production of The Threepenny Opera has received a mixed reception. But I did have the feeling that too much was borrowed to too little effect.Sir Andrew Davis conducted the BBC Symphony Chorus and Symphony Orchestra in a well-prepared account of Anderson's score, and a glowing one of Ravel's Daphnis and Chlo?arlier, David Goode produced an even bigger noise than did the several hundred souls assembled on stage for Daphnis, as he gave the mighty Albert Hall organ an energetic, if occasionally splashy workout. As always with Anderson, the orchestral writing was scintillating and succulent by turns.Yet the extensive writing for chorus is often pedestrian. Pointing to obvious models - Ives's Unanswered Question for the beginning, as well as Britten's War Requiem - is arguably a little unfair. The notion of mixing settings of the Latin Mass and Psalm 84 with Emily Dickinson, pared down to generate a sophisticated musical structure of five movements lasting half an hour, is a good one. The decision to use both a mezzo-soprano soloist and a flugelhorn was inspired, and leads to some fine moments where melody takes wing, as in the flugelhorn solo, played here with passion by Bill Houghton.