Over his five years as artistic director of the fine company Northern Ballet Theatre, David Nixon has shown his ability to make full-length works of great popular appeal, which at the same time have considerable depth, and the ability to affect our emotions. A Midsummer Night's Dream is perhaps his most successful.

This highly entertaining version of Shakespeare's classic is set among the members of a classical dance company, with the first act taking place in a studio during class, and then during a rehearsal for Romeo and Juliet. One of the problems of telling a story about dancers' lives, in dance, is how you differentiate between their real lives and their actions as dancers. Nixon has solved this cleverly by keeping them on pointe during rehearsals, class and the dream sequence, and flat-footed (so to speak) when they are dancing out their story.

Hippolyta (Keiko Amemori, what a dancer!) is the leading dancer, engaged to Theseus (Hironao Takahashi), the company's artistic director, who wants her to retire when she marries him. The quartet of confused lovers are principal dancers in the company. Bottom (likeable Darren Goldsmith) is the stage carpenter - a slim man by nature, wearing gigantic prosthetic buttocks that are the posterior equivalent of Cyrano's nose.

Nixon handles the humour brilliantly, with a hilarious duet in the first act, in which Demetrius (Tobias Batley) tries to dump Helena (a wonderful performance from the diminutive Christie Duncan) as she winds herself around him, climbs all over him and entangles her limbs with his in a series of increasingly complex manoeuvres.

In the second act, when Puck has made a mess of things, the action reaches a climax of inventive confusion as the four protagonists, woken from their slumbers and dancing in their underwear, hurl themselves on to one small bed to form a human sandwich all in the wrong order. But David Nixon can move us also. The long solo in which Hippolyta says farewell to her dancing shoes, but cannot say farewell to her dancing, is extremely beautiful; and the passionate final duet of reconciliation between her and Theseus shows us that this ballet has heart as well as humour.

Duncan Hayler's sets are excellent, and the miraculous way in which a mirrored dance-studio turns in seconds into a lighted express train waiting under the great canopy of Kings Cross station is a true coup-de-theatre.

Finally, what can I say about Victoria Sibson's faun-like Puck? Fantastic!

You can still catch A Midsummer Night's Dream tonight and tomorrow at Milton Keynes Theatre (0870 060 6652).