Shakespeare has been neither ill-treated nor ignored by the dance world. With their strong characters and meaty narratives, for centuries his plays have proved a rich source of inspiration for choreo- graphers. Latest to have a go is David Nixon, artistic director of Northern Ballet Theatre, who is about to premiere his Hamlet in the company's home town of Leeds

The drawback for any adapter, of course, is having to drop all that complex and ravishing text. Dance, though, isn't called the universal language for nothing. The magic has worked time and again for ballet adaptations of Romeo and Juliet with the tragic lovers exerting an irresistible pull on choreographers.

Some of the Bard's other blockbusters, however, haven't fared so well - with Hamlet a regular stumbling block. If Macbeth is the problem play, with theatre directors often suffering spectacular losses in the battle to do the text justice, Hamlet is its ballet counterpart.

Although dance incarnations of the Melancholy Dane date back to the 18th century, few have made a lasting impression. How can you possibly measure up to source material that at its angst-ridden core is so internal?

It's surprising, then, just how many times choreographers have had a go. In the mid-1930s the great Russian modernist Bronislava Nijinska danced the title role in her own production of the ballet in Paris. In Robert Helpmann's well-regarded one-act, which had its premiere in London in 1942, a dying Hamlet relives crucial moments of his life. The whole hallucinatory vision lasts a neat 18 minutes.

Some more recent danced Hamlets have been notable mostly for falling short. Kenneth MacMillan's 1988 chamber drama Sea of Troubles is commonly deemed a footnote to a great career. The Danish-born but British-based Kim Brandstrup created the intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying Antic in 1993. His fellow countryman, Peter Schaufuss, staged a Hamlet at Elsinore that was quite a coup in terms of location, but hardly a world-beating success.

Just last year the British-born Christopher Wheeldon mounted a one-act Hamlet at the Bolshoi Ballet. At least that was his intention. He'd even ordered the thrones and the crowns. But daunted by the task he had set for himself, Wheeldon eventually dropped the idea of a narrative ballet in favour of a far more abstract piece. Entitled Elsinore, it earned mixed reviews at best. Even one of contemporary ballet's most gifted young dancemakers could not crack Hamlet.

This decidedly rocky history isn't about to stop the Canadian-born Nixon from trying. His Hamlet is being presented as part of a trilogy of Shakespeare adaptations that will tour the UK until early June after the Leeds opening. The other two works - a heart-rending Romeo and Juliet from 1991, and Nixon's delightful A Midsummer Night's Dream from 2003 - both garnered critical acclaim and Olivier Award nominations.

In a break from rehearsals Nixon tells me: “Many people would say that Hamlet is a brave thing to take on because they're looking at it from the outside in, and putting the play on a pedestal where it belongs. The confusion we get is that we are doing the play itself rather than a work based on the play. It's as if people expect a word-for-word, scene-by-scene translation. That could never be.”

Nixon, an affable 49-year-old from Ontario, has wanted to create a Hamlet ballet for years. More than two decades ago he was the lead in Patrice Montagnon's production at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. “Once you dance Hamlet it sort of remains with you. I felt I wanted to take this somewhere. What might I be able to do with it?”

Nixon's purpose is neither to abuse nor abandon Shakespeare, but to use the text as inspiration for a new slant on an old story. His Hamlet is set in a grim Nazi-occupied Paris where Claudius is a fascist collaborator, Hamlet a soldier just released from a PoW camp and Ophelia a mad girl who has the misfortune to be out on the streets after curfew. In dramatic terms the brutal realities of wartime are a step beyond Nixon's previous work for NBT, including a delicately tragic Madame Butterfly, a brooding Wuthering Heights and a frolicsome The Three Musketeers.

He agrees. “I have not done anything as dark or as human as this. Of course some people are going to be romantic about the play. But placing it where we have makes it much less romantic. The rules of what is or is not acceptable, or predictable, have changed.”

NBT is one of the most visible and popular classical troupes in the UK. Accessible, name-brand story ballets are its engine. This has sometimes led to accusations of pandering to the masses. In the past the standards of the dancing were also questioned. Nixon has turned that around. Perhaps, he suggests, it's high time that the 38-strong company he has headed since 2001 be regarded as something more than a poor cousin.

“Our place in the overall picture of dance companies isn't fully understood. There isn't an appreciation of just how difficult some of the stuff we're doing is. People shouldn't expect the same type of performance in an opera house that you get with a company like ours, and one that tours many weeks with a much smaller number of dancers. They're a very courageous group with a strong technique. They'll pretty much go for anything in the sense that an actor would.”

In creating Hamlet, Nixon and his dancers have undertaken some highly collaborative research, from improvisations in the studio to reading books and watching films ranging from Rome: Open City to Pan's Labyrinth. The aim has been to find the right historical context for the emotional truth of Shakespeare and then translate that into dance. “What we are doing is not verbatim,” he says. “We're not saying, 'To be or not to be' with movement.”

Instead, he says, “we're asking, ‘What is the essence of this boy, and all the people around him? What are they going through?' It's been a very fulfilling and motivational process.”

Hamlet, Grand Theatre, Leeds (www.northernballettheatre.co.uk 0844 8482701), Feb 16-23 then touring

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