Next week Northern Ballet Theatre bring David Nixon's startling new version of Hamlet, set in 0ccupied Paris, to Milton Keynes Theatre. He talked about the production to DAVID BELLAN

David Nixon is a highly talented choreographer, and also a wonderful storyteller, usually choosing highly dramatic works such as Wuthering Heights, Dracula and Madame Butterfly. He's also done two very successful Shakespeares . . . Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

But Hamlet? Others have tried with limited success, the most notable probably Robert Helpmann's 1942 one-acter, which hasn't been seen for decades.

I asked David what had made him want to risk doing it.

"Hamlet is one of the best plays that exist, and I was fortunate to dance in a version when I was in Berlin. It was a very interesting interpretation, and I really enjoyed fitting into the character of Hamlet. I wanted to do a Shakespeare that was a bit darker and deeper than the previous ones. I'm very attracted to the complex characters in Hamlet, and Northern Ballet Theatre is a company that explores theatre as much as dance, so this seemed an ideal vehicle for them."

David has moved the period and setting of the play from Denmark to Nazi-occupied Paris in the 1940s. It's no longer about troubles in a royal household, but essentially nearly all the characters are there, albeit in different occupations.

"Hamlet's stepfather, his uncle Claudius, is the head of the Paris police, so he's in a position of authority, and he's also collaborating with the Nazis. The regime he develops is quite fascist in its whole approach. One of the worst things about Paris at this time was the amount of collaboration that went on . . . your neighbour could be a collaborator. Hamlet is a young soldier who has returned from the war and finds that not only is his city occupied by an enemy, but his mother is sleeping with a collaborator, and his house is filled with them."

In Elsinore, Hamlet is a prince. I wondered whether making him a simple soldier might not weaken his position when trying to put things right.

"We haven't taken the approach from the angle of revenge so much, it's more his situation and what to do - do you even take revenge? In the Shakespeare play Hamlet never actually takes revenge. He spends a lot of time thinking about it, or about whether he should kill himself instead.

"My version is more about the emotional journey of Hamlet trying to figure out what to do, and what his mother's really up to. Even as a prince, Hamlet is technically in a weak, precarious position, because it's his uncle who has the power. Hamlet should, by rights, have been king, and I think one of the reason's Gertrude married Claudius was to ensure that her son would get to the throne one day."

Nixon created this full-length drama in just four weeks.

"It's a complicated piece, and doing it in that time could have been a disaster, but the dancers were so committed and so involved. They'd done research, and they understood immediately where we were trying to go with it, so it choreographed itself quite easily."

The music was commissioned from Phillip Feeney, a composer with huge experience of writing for dance.

"He's just unbelievably canny about how to write a ballet. We had a meeting to discuss the period and time and the setting, which would give him an idea stylistically about where he wanted to go. We hadn't finished the scenario when he started, so he would do pieces for a scene on a synthesiser and send them to me.

"I may have asked him to change maybe two minutes in the whole thing, which really came out of rehearsals, because sometimes when you're choreographing something you find you don't need as much time as you thought. In other places I might ask him to expand it, but he's a genius at achieving this kind of thing, and it's a really interesting and dynamic score."

This is a very dark work, with graphic scenes of sex, rape and torture - the most adult work Nixon has created.

"The word a lot of people use about this production is gripping'. The reason for the violence is the setting. Everything is less predictable, and people's way of behaving is not normal.

"So, for example, in the play Ophelia drowns in the river, but when you're in occupied Paris, and you're a young girl and you're slightly crazy, wandering the streets at night without your paperwork, you don't just fall in a river, you would more likely come across some German soldiers who would rape you and kill you.

"It makes it even more tragic because we see this sweet young girl who is carrying a posy of Nazi flags, and she hands them out as a symbol of all the tears that have fallen as a result of this one little flag. And then what happens to her is the most horrendous thing that can happen. But in the period in which the original play is set I think they would have been even more violent."

Hamlet is at Milton Keynes Theatre from Tuesday until Saturday, May 24. Box office: 0870 060 6652.