Queensland Ballet, Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane, April 1.

The second act of Liam Scarlett’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream begins with deliciously controlled chaos. At the behest of Oberon, lord of the forest and fairies, Puck has got busy with magic love dust. The result is instantaneous passion for whoever is first seen, complicated by Puck’s tendency to get things wrong. Mayhem ensues as pleasure-seeking mortals, their entourage of bumbling rustics and the fairies whose domain has been invaded dash about trying to make sense of things. Proper order has been disrupted and must be restored, but not before there has been an ample display of foolishness from all quarters.

Scarlett remains entirely faithful to Shakespeare’s comedy, apart from the unsurprising excision of Theseus’s Athenian court. Otherwise it’s all there. Oberon and his queen Titania squabble over a Changeling boy (amusingly clad in a purple onesie and clutching a storybook and a toy donkey), humans enter the forest at night and are captured by its mystery, and Titania is smitten with the low-born Bottom, who has unfortunately gained an ass’s head but is an absolute sweetheart.

Scarlett, not yet 30, is one of the most sought-after names in classical choreography with commissions from top-drawer companies including New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, English National Ballet and his home base, London’s Royal Ballet. Queensland Ballet’s co-production with Royal New Zealand Ballet (which premiered the work last year) gives these smaller outfits entry into a rather exclusive club. It’s quite a coup and they have a delectable ballet to show for it – one that’s genuinely funny, frequently touching and outstandingly sensual in its movement and visual appeal.

Tracy Grant Lord’s set design provides Scarlett with a sumptuous playground, an ornate multi-level affair that evokes a dense tree canopy and allows the fairies to dart in and out of view, gorgeously bathed in Kendall Smith’s lighting. Puck is established as a creature of the air, spotted at first in a lofty hideaway (he has to shimmy down a pole to reach ground level) and Oberon as an autocrat who likes to survey his domain from on high and whose moods can alter the very atmosphere. When he is angry the stars take notice.

Grant Lord was responsible for the striking costumes too – adorably fluffy tutus in saturated colours for the fairies and sportif day wear for the mortals, who have come equipped with tents, torches, nets and the rustics for backup. They are on a fairy safari. Bless.

Scarlett fills the forest with rapturous choreography that eloquently describes story and music. (The first thing everyone says about Scarlett is that he is intensely musical.) With their busy arms and feet the fairies indeed look as if they can fly while their swooning (and at one point shivering) backs give a delicious hint of excitements to come. The language is unquestionably classical but Scarlett relaxes ballet’s upright lines with swirling, supple freedom in the upper body that contrasts happily with bright, sharp, ground-skimming footwork. The characters are thrilingly alert and alive. It’s not hard to feel the influence of the Royal Ballet’s founder choreographer, Frederick Ashton, although Scarlett has a confident voice of his own. He certainly hasn’t copied Ashton’s one-act The Dream but there is nevertheless a delicate Ashtonian quality in this ballet.

On opening night QB’s newest principal dancer, Victor Estevez – just 22 years old! – was expansive and commanding as Oberon and Laura Hidalgo’s Titania was light and airy when with Bottom and more sexually charged when with Oberon. The Act II pas deux in which the two make up after their quarrel is stunningly intimate – the sexy little shivers of Titania’s legs as she is entwined with Oberon say it all. Camilo Ramos was a bouncy, highly likeable Puck and Rian Thompson delightful as Bottom. Every fairy and rustic had his or her moment too. This is a ballet made for relatively small forces and a meaningful part for everyone.

Of course the mortals never manage to capture any fairies, those enticing supernatural beings whose presence is known and felt but remains invisible. On opening night Yanela Piñera, Shane Wuerthner, Clare Morehen and Vito Bernasconi were the four high-spirited lovers who leave the forest with their nets empty but their hearts full. Scarlett makes each of them individual and engaging.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is danced to the much-loved Mendelssohn incidental music for Shakespeare’s play, augmented with selections from other works by the composer to create a full-length ballet. Nigel Gaynor, who conducted Queensland Symphony Orchestra in a spirited performance, stitched it all together admirably. Gaynor and Scarlett chose music that would be, as Gaynor told me in New Zealand, “proportionate to the fairy world”. Oberon dances to the Hebrides Overture of 1830 and, as Gaynor pointed out, it first appeared on the same program as the Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream. “It belongs,” he said. Music from the Octet in E-Flat Major – written when Mendelssohn was only 16 – is fittingly given to Puck: Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny wrote of the scherzo that “one feels so near the world of spirits, carried away in the air”.

Gaynor, by the way, was RNZB’s music director when Dream was being created; he now holds the same position with QB. The man who had been QB’s music director and principal conductor from 2013-2015, Andrew Mogrelia, is currently guest conductor at The Australian Ballet, at the helm of most of the performances of Swan Lake. Small world.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream ends in Brisbane on April 16.

A version of this review appeared in The Australian on April 4.