THE Great Gatsby first caught the imagination of David Nixon as a schoolboy in Canada in 1974.

It has been a long journey from page to stage, one where F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel blossoms anew in Nixon’s sensuous choreography and Jazz Age costume designs, making for a breathtaking production, full of Twenties’glamour of course, but also suffused with the heightened, turbulent emotions of jealousy, desire, loneliness, longing, rapture and anguish.

Not only does Northern Ballet’s artistic director excel, so too designer Jerome Kaplan and lighting designer Tim Mitchell. Kaplan favours minimalism, relying on panels that change as quick as a finger click to evoke busy New York, desolate New Jersey, decadent party and hard-graft garage.

In the absence of language, the moods and emotions are represented as much by choice of colour – drab versus bright – as by the music of the late Sir Richard Rodney Bennett that accompanies the dazzling Charleston and tango sequences as memorably as the solos and duos.

Northern Ballet also has its best stock of dancers since the electrifying days of Charlotte Talbot and Jonathan Ollivier. Martha Leebolt continues to thrill above all others, here as Daisy, former lover of Jay Gatsby (a haunted and haunting Tobias Batley, who superbly conveys the distant, hands-in-pocket observer, until Daisy reignites Gatsby and his dancing alike).

Victoria Sibson’s Myrtle is, to put it bluntly, truly hot stuff, and Benjamin Mitchell, so magnetic as troubled mechanic George, is the name on everyone’s lips post-show. Great Gastby, great show.

The Great Gatsby, Northern Ballet, Leeds Grand Theatre, ends tomorrow; Hull New Theatre, April 3 to 6. Box office: Leeds, 0844 848 2700; Hull, 01482 300300.