THE train now pulling out of the Quarry Theatre platform is the Midsummer Night's sleeper from London Kings Cross to Edinburgh Waverley, calling at Fairyland.

For its first production at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Northern Ballet Theatre has transported Shake-speare's best-loved comedy from Athens and the Amazons into a train journey. Furthermore, the romantic entanglements no longer involve Athenean high society but a 1940s' touring dance company.

Puck is now Robin Puck (Christian Broomhall), the ballet master; squabbling love birds Lysander (Jonathan Ollivier), Demetrius (Christopher Hinton-Lewis), Helena (Pippa Moore) and Hermia (Keiko Amemori) are principal dancers; Theseus (Hironao Takahashi) is the artistic director; Hippolyta (Desir Samaai), the Prima Ballerina. And Bottom? He is Nick Bottom (Adam Temple), big-bottomed stage carpenter.

Rather than the "rude mechanicals" of Shakespeare's play, the players have made way for a Stage Manager, Wardrobe Master, Train Guard, Station Porter and Rehearsal Pianist.

Add the orchestra, arraigned like rowers in adjacent galleons, and the music of Mendelssohn and Brahms, and this novel train journey is complete.

Is Dixon taking you for a ride? Well, the production threatens to de-rail early on, the first act being one long scene-setting with too little dance in a ballet rehearsal, before technical wizardry turns that room into a train before your very eyes.

More technical wizardry, and designer Duncan Hayler conjures up a side-on view of the crammed carriages where Broomhall's nimble Puck orchestrates the romantic tiffs and trysts like Joel Grey's Emcee in Cabaret. This section is balletic silent comedy, in Buster Keaton-on-a-train vein, and the train design is a barrier to seeing faces. Up to this point, this new Dream has replicated a standard weekend train journey: frustrating but with the promise of better things to come.

Thankfully they come soon, in a first class second act. By now the train has turned white, suspended upside down from the sky along with two beds, as the journey north passes through the eye of a tunnel into fairyland. Suddenly the choreography is witty and sexy, even saucy for Bottom making an ass of himself. The dancers are liberated too.

Alas, the third act is like waiting for a late train: standing around, or in this case dancing that does little more than fill time rather than seeking a way to do the mechanicals' wall play. The reason? Dixon "especially wanted to bring out the love elements".

However, for that second act, do buy a ticket to ride.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Northern Ballet Theatre, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until September 13

Box office: 0113 213 7700.

Updated: 12:09 Friday, September 12, 2003