THIS summer, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four came out top of a teachers' list of 100 novels that "every student should read before leaving secondary school".

The poll by 500 teachers for the National Association for the Teaching of English and the TES magazine re-affirms the continuing impact of a book written in 1948 but whose vision of the future haunted by surveillance will always feel like a world that is just around the corner, even worse than where we are now.

Orwell's dystopian depiction of a nightmarish, repressive future transferred to the silver screen in Michael Radford's film with John Hurt, released aptly in 1984, while the Yorkshire stage has accommodated such productions as Nick Lane's adaptation for Hull Truck and last year's radical new staging by Headlong, on tour at York Theatre Royal.

Such is the physicality and potent imagery in Orwell's vision that a ballet interpretation is not a step too far for a novel rooted in the power of words, but it requires brave choreography and direction. Northern Ballet artistic director David Nixon made a canny choice in asking Jonathan Watkins to "create something" for the Leeds company, and Watkins has duly picked Orwell's book that inspired him from the age of 15.

In a nutshell, stripped of words, ballet is emotion in motion, with great store placed on design and music too. Orwell's oppressive, stifling Oceania, a world suppressed by hi-tech surveillance and the prying eyes of Big Brother on telescreens, is brilliantly conveyed by Andrzej Goulding's ever-present video design and Simon Daw's sets and costumes in uniform, cold greys and blues. Alex Baranowski's music similarly captures the contrast between the regimented and the rebellious that is at the root of Watkins's thrilling choreography.

The regimented is represented by the metronomic, angular movements of the Party apparatchiks in the Ministry of Truth offices; the rebellious by the unrestrained, manic dancing of the Proles, the labouring classes of Oceania.

Comrade Winston Smith (Tobias Batley), the rebel diarist, and his lover, Julia (Martha Leebolt), conduct their outlawed love affair in the run-down junk shop premises of Mr Charrington (Hiranao Takahashi), where the red walls match the passion expressed in Batley and Leebolt's breathtaking, intricate, intimate duets, full of abandon and reckless spontaneity.

Javier Torres's slick Party string-puller, O'Brien, has more than something of the night about him, not only in his black shirt, even if the torture techniques of Room 101 do not match the squirming-in-the-seat discomfort and disorientation of last year's Headlong show.

The clash of humanity versus inhumanity drives Watkins's 1984, the march of technology and the Thought Police squashing Winston's sense of truth to the point where his loss of identity, his very life, is crystallised in an unforgettable ending in a mass of departing bodies and the disappearing letters of his name.

1984, Northern Ballet, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until Saturday; then on tour until May 28 2016, including Sheffield Lyceum Theatre, October 20 to 24. Box office: Leeds, 0113 213 7700 or wyp.org.uk; Sheffield, 0114 249 6000 or sheffieldtheatres.co.uk