Shakespeare's capricious fairies, bewildered lovers and bumbling mechanicals don't always spring to life in Benjamin Britten's stylised operatic treatment of the play. There's something a bit too calculating about his music, especially the nudge-wink parodies of the play-within-a-play. But Martin Duncan's new production for Opera North, though apparently done on a shoestring, is a delight. So is Stuart Stratford's conducting, which encourages the players in the pit to characterise their lines as pungently as the singers on the stage.

The trumpet, for instance, scampers as virtuosically as Tom Walker's mesmerising boy-monkey Puck while the strings slither and shimmy as hypnotically as the groovy floating balloons, translucent plastic screens and psychedelic rainbow glows in Johan Engels's sets.

The latter have a trance-like feel, and the social collisions of the turbulent 1960s are also evoked by Ashley Martin-Davis's cleverly differentiated costumes: groovy flower-power gear for the young lovers as they succumb to their substance-induced dreams; glittering sequined gowns for Oberon and Tytania; blond beehive wigs for the fairies (both boys and girls in this excellent children's chorus); working-men's clothes for the Mechanicals.

Yet what really drives Duncan's staging is not its evocative trappings but the energy and truthfulness of the acting. The four lovers — Frances Bourne's volatile Hermia, Elizabeth Atherton's masochistically besotted Helena, Peter Wedd's ardent Lysander, Mark Stone's callous Demetrius — are a seething mass of impassioned, immature, indignant and (by Act II) thoroughly bewildered feelings. Even when awakened to “reality” with their confusions supposedly unravelled, Duncan ensures that their body language — holding hands, then suddenly pulling apart — speaks of unresolved fault lines. And all four sing with fervour.

Although James Laing (Oberon) and Jeni Bern (Tytania) don't quite deliver these vocal thrills, Laing is one of the few to get most of his words across. Lazy enunciation is this show's only flaw — and there are no surtitles. But two seasoned stalwarts, Peter Savidge and Yvonne Howard, manage to make something memorable and funny of Theseus and Hippolyta, though neither has much more than a cough and a spit.

By then the show has been hijacked by Henry Waddington's gloriously preening Bottom, Richard Burkhard's perpetually exasperated Quince and their crew of press-ganged thespians. The Pyramus and Thisbe episode can often be embarrassingly lame but the caricatures here are so convincing, the timing so perfectly judged, the comic inspiration so well sustained, and the final Full Monty-ish dance done with such touching earnestness that the scene fizzes like a firework.

How exhilarating to hear an audience convulsed with laughter in an opera house. A fitting climax to a day on which Opera North announced it will receive £3.5 million of additional Arts Council funding to expand its work over three years.

You can catch this midsummer night's enchantment in Leeds, Nottingham, Newcastle, Salford or Woking during the next two months.

Box office: 0870 1251898

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