A Midsummer Night's Dream, Northern Ballet, touring, review "There was no need for that lavatory," sniffed a Leeds matron to her husband. Quite unnecessary. The pair were chatting during the interval at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, having just watched the first act of David Nixon's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Their faces, like bags of spanners, were in marked contrast to the smiles around them. Northern Ballet's Dream is not without its faults, but it's an attractive, often innovative, show packed with moments of magic. Nixon's big idea was to set the story of quarrelling fairies, mismatched mortals and lumpen mechanicals in a Forties ballet company about to take the night train for Scotland. Once aboard, the Puckish ballet master (nimble new boy Kevin Poeung) oversees a night of corridor-creeping, during which disputes are settled and the lovers united before the company arrive in Edinburgh for a triumphant premiere of Romeo and Juliet. The switch from ballet studio to Flying Scotsman is made possible by Duncan Hayter's thriftily spectacular set - the entire 2003 production came in at a modest £120,000. The upstage slant of rehearsal-room windows becomes the gleaming, lamplit carriages of the train with just a change of lighting and a brief encounter with the smoke machine. Inside the sleeping cars, a bank of swivelling units suggest the individual compartments (including the offending lavatory). The story's pretexts for pairwork have always attracted choreographers to A Midsummer Night's Dream, and although the big duets for Theseus/Oberon and Hippolyta/Titania don't hit the emotional heights achieved by George Balanchine or Frederick Ashton, they offer an attractive showcase for the partnering skills of Royal Ballet-schooled Tobias Batley and for Martha Leebolt's clean, bright pointework. Nixon's writing is at its best in the terrific show-stealing numbers for the four lesser lovers. Bouncy Antoinette Brooks-Daw's Helena has the wittiest steps in the ballet and she relishes every slapstick moment, hurling herself at Giuliano Contadini's beefy Demetrius like a killer koala. Northern Ballet are enjoying an action-packed autumn. Dream has a four-city tour, followed by a revival of Christopher Gable's cheery Christmas Carol. Meanwhile the company is planning a version of Cinderella - also designed by Duncan Hayter and with a commissioned score by Philip Feeney. More breathing space might have given Nixon a chance to step back from Dream and address the problems. Ashton managed to triple-distil Shakespeare's five-act comedy down to a brisk 52 minutes, hardly sacrificing a scene, but Nixon - aided and abetted by Patricia Doyle, his dramaturge (a word with a built-in groan) - drags the story out to a two-interval marathon. This loss of narrative focus obliged musical director John Longstaff to bulk up Mendelssohn's score with supplementary chunks of Prokofiev and Brahms, whose second symphony is hijacked for an entirely superfluous jitterbug. Nixon's "retiring ballerina" theme is only sketchily conveyed, and despite enough finger-wagging dumbshow to "sign" an entire episode of Coronation Street, he still resorts to the use of dialogue in the first act (a sure sign of desperation). Bottom key function is never in doubt (cue orgasmic-donkey sound effects) but it is never clear what the rest of the mechanicals are up to during the dream sequence and the rambling third act has no proper finale. The story could end with the three-way marriage proposals and the famous Wedding March but instead meanders on and ends with a whimper as Puck stumbles through Shakespeare's epilogue. Touring UK to May 31; northernballet.com