Opera North’s year-long programme of works with Shakespearian associations reaches something of a climax with Martin Duncan’s shimmering, psychedelic vision of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The year began with a revival of Verdi’s Falstaff and continues throughout the spring and summer with this Dream, in repertory with new productions of Verdi’s Macbeth and Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette.

It is for this kind of thematic, occasionally offbeat programming that the Leeds-based company has built up such a voracious audience at its home, the Grand Theatre, and on tour, and one can only marvel that Opera North can offer its patrons such a full and well-balanced repertoire when our other opera companies increasingly cleave to popular favourites.

Unlike the company’s previous encounter with Britten - Phyllida Lloyd’s poleaxing staging of Peter Grimes - Duncan’s Dream will not tour to London, but it does come south to Woking’s congenial New Victoria Theatre at the end of the tour (after Nottingham, Newcastle and Salford Quays), and it really should not be missed. I think it is the most purely enjoyable staging of this comic masterpiece seen in the UK since Peter Hall’s classic production at Glyndebourne in 1981. It is certainly the most original and funny version I have seen in the theatre.

Initially, I had doubts. Johan Engels’s set banishes any hint of bosky woodland vista and Dingly Dell-style fairyland. This is, at first, a disconcertingly abstract Dream in which the characters emerge as blurred visions through translucent, corrugated plastic curtains and screens. Oberon and Tytania are human glitterballs, whose sci-fi costumes (by Ashley Martin-Davis) twinkle and refract light, lending a magical aura to these slightly sinister immortals. Their fairy entourage is even creepier: bottle-blond Midwich Cuckoos with crow’s-feather wings. Perhaps they miss the innocent charm inherent in some of Britten’s music for children’s voices, but they capture its ethereal, eerie aspect to perfection.

Duncan differentiates the three “classes” of character brilliantly. The lovers are chic 1960s flower people, the girls in diaphanous, rainbow-coloured summer frocks, the boys in patterned suits that suggest an upmarket homage to the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album. When Oberon and Puck anoint their eyes with the juice of the aphrodisiac flower, they seem to experience LSD-fuelled trips, rather than dreams,but it all works perfectly on its ownterms. Britten’s opera was the first operatic masterpiece of the Sinful Sixties, and Duncan’s staging subtly evokes the anarchic, let-it-all-hang-out permissiveness and flamboyance of the period without indulging in graphic scenes of simulated sex. The restraint of the production is reflected in the lighting plot devised by the aptly named Bruno Poet, who ideally captures the chiaroscuro of Britten’s moonlit score in visual terms. The play of light and darkness is integral to a production that ravishes the eye as much as Britten’s music, with its glinting harp and star-spangled celesta, seduces the ear.

Duncan’s most signal achievement is the freshness of the comic scenes, the lovers’ quarrel - in which Peter Wedd’s Lysander and Mark Stone’s Demetrius strip down to their very loud underwear - and, above all, the antics of the Rude Mechanicals, whom Britten called Rustics, and here come as a ready-made troupe of clowns, each individually characterised and side-huggingly funny - I don’t think I have ever laughed as much at the Pyramus and Thisbe yarn in the theatre or the opera house. Geoffrey Dolton’s madcap Man in the Moon (Starveling), Nicholas Sharratt’s deadpan Wall (Snout) and Sion Goronwy’s giant of a Lion (Snug) are unforgettable, but Colin Judson’s bearded Diana Dors-parody of a Thisbe (Flute) and Richard Burkhard’s pernickety, camp luvvie of a director (Peter Quince) are treasurable too.

With the exception of James Laing’s vocally pallid Oberon, the principals are excellent. Elizabeth Atherton (Helena), Frances Bourne (Hermia), Wedd and Stone are a “beautiful people” quartet of lovers who abandon their flower-power couture in favour of Glyndebourne yuppie gear for the play at Theseus’s court. Their voices blend gorgeously in the reconciliation quartet. Jeni Bern’s glam-orous starlet Tytania and Henry Waddington’s earthy Bottom are delicious antipodes. Bern sings Britten’s stratospheric melismata as well as she looks. Even the Royals, Peter Savidge’s raffish Theseus and Yvonne Howard’s imposing Hippolyta, brandishing a blingy vanity purse, are cast from strength. Tom Walker’s raucous, athletic Puck is original, too. Half human, half beast, with a chest as smooth as a baby’s bottom and alarmingly hirsute legs, he looks like a refugee from Channel 4’s Embarrassing Illnesses.

Capping the company’s success, Stuart Stratford gets playing of extraordinary detail and colour from Opera North’s orchestra, perhaps the finest pit band in the country outside Covent Garden or Glyndebourne. Rarely has Britten’s score sounded richer or tauter. That is a tribute to Stratford, but also to Duncan’s production team, the superb ensemble and the wonderful children’s chorus. A triumph.

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