During his time as artistic director of Northern Ballet, David Nixon has shown himself the master of story-ballets, with works such as Madame Butterfly, Wuthering Heights, and, more recently, the enormously successful Cleopatra.

His new work is a fairly tale crafted for adults as well as children.

“My ballet is very relevant to a lot of stuff that you see on TV, where it’s really about how people look and dress. There’s such an emphasis on physical appearance, and not really thinking about the person.

“It’s set in a 1950s-meets-21st-century design. In the original story the father has become impoverished because his ships sink at sea, but I thought today it would be like using plastic cards and shopping too much. The sisters simply have no concept of money, and they just keep spending and spending and he ends up with the bill, and gets everything collected and carried away. So I’ve put over the original story, but in a very contemporary way of visualising it.”

Clearly Nixon’s story has a lot of background to fill in, and I asked him where we are as the curtain goes up.

“We start off with the prince, who is extremely fond of himself. He lives in a room of mirrors; the men try to imitate him, the women try to get his attention, and they all just worship him. He almost walks around as if he’s on a catwalk all the time. Into that comes a fairy who is begging for food, but they have no interest in her — ‘you’re too ugly, get out of our face’ — and of course she turns into the fairy who casts a spell and turns him into a beast. So you get a set-up of a really hollow person. But later on, when the Beast is imagining how, if he did look like his old self, he could be with this wonderful girl named Beauty, the first image he recalls is of himself as the same arrogant person, and he wants to change that image”

The prince and Beast are played by two different dancers. David Nixon explained his thinking behind that decision.

“First of all it makes the transformation easier, but more importantly it gives two big roles to two dancers, and also this way I get a different look, so The Prince has a very different look from The Beast, and you get more of a sense of him being transformed”.

Nixon has also added some extra characters to the story.

“There’s of course the father, but then I’ve given Beauty two sisters who add humour to the story; they’re just hanging out spending money on shopping. Then there are three fairies. You’d think at first one is a bad fairy, one is a servant and one a sort of goddess, but my idea is that they’re three beings who go around finding people like the Prince, and set them upon a journey in which they can hopefully find themselves, and become a better person. There are also hobgoblins and sprites and wedding couples and friends, but those are the main characters.”

The story is danced out on very ambitious sets by Duncan Hayler.

“The set is large and has lots of different changes. I wanted Duncan Hayler because he’s very much what we call a singing-and-dancing set designer.

The set is very rarely just decoration on stage — it always tends to have some movement to it. There’s a wonderful moment in the second scene where a removal truck backs up onto the stage, and the set is designed so that the whole room literally disappears into that truck, and you end up in the forest.

“There’s also a beautiful thing he made — a heart-box — which represents The Beast’s broken heart in a way, but it is also the room in the castle in which Beauty, when it opens up, is sleeping in a big white rose, The audience is always quite amazed by that scene; they can’t believe at first that there’s a woman sleeping in this rose.”

As usual David Nixon has designed the costumes himself.

“I was getting tired of designing period costumes, and also thinking about the kids, who don’t even know what Victorian is. They don’t identify with the period, they identify with the character and what the character might wear. First I saw two evening gowns, and they looked to me as though they were fairies.

“Fairies don’t have to be in a tutu with wings pointing out the back. Then I started thinking; ‘how can the rest of it be some sort of fantasy on haute couture and the catwalk?’, so I put the girls in sort of Amy Winehouse Fifties retro-ball look, while the boys are much more Armani and space-age.”

Beauty And The Beast is at Milton Keynes Theatre from April 17 to 21 and at Aylesbury Waterside from November 13 to 17.