'In the book, you don't hear her speaking, but Peter - who can hear her - is always telling her off. You get the impression she's using bad language and calling people names.

'She's a jazzy little fairy.' Lustig was inspired in his 'spit and grit' characterisation, he said, by female dancers he met in some ballet companies.

'They dance exquisitely, but offstage they speak like this,' he says, imitating a Cockney accent, adding 'they swear like troopers'.

This choreography, which Lustig first devised for the Scottish National Ballet in 1989, is the first ever 'Peter Pan the ballet', as opposed to Peter Pan the play and book which were written in turn of the century Scotland.

The set is based on the work of Scottish Art Nouveau architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

So the nursery scene in 1905 Glasgow is inspired by one of Mackintosh's interior designs, while the fantasy Never Never Land where the adventures take place, is based on his landscape watercolours.

It is a complicated ballet, because it involves flying, fighting and a huge cast of characters, including lost boys, fairies, pirates, a Nanny sheepdog and a dancing crocodile, Lustig says.

'When I first got into the studio I thought how on earth am I going to make the crocodile move?' But after the sound of a ringing alarm clock was introduced into the music, he devised a 'wriggly kind of tail-wagging kind of jiving' dance for the crafty croc who, from Barrie's original story, is definitely a female.

'She bit off Hook's arm, and has been hungering for the rest of him ever since,' he says, laughing.

Unlike Barrie, who was happy to see Peter Pan performed by a woman in the original play, Lustig insisted on a male dancer as the lead.

'It had to be a man, not only for the partnering, but I couldn't bear the idea of loose pixie costumes. Peter Pan is definitely a boy.' The movements of this boy who would never grow up are based on Lustig's observations of children.

'A little boy is captivated by whatever is holding his attention. Sometimes he gets bored and then he just turns away and focuses on something else.

'But children are so often 100 per cent happy, or totally sad, or entirely furious. Peter has this developed anima about him.

'He's creative, elemental, there are no half measures. It's liberating in one way, but in another he's trapped in this persona, he can't mature,' Lustig says.

The story is based on how Peter, searching for a mother figure for his gang of Lost Boys, finds a real little girl, Wendy (a name invented by Barrie, after a little girl started calling him 'my fwendy'), and whisks her off to Never Never Land.

In the beginning it seems idyllic, but then the pirates arrive, garrote the good Red Indians, kidnap the Lost Boys and the battles begin.

The music was written by Edward McGuire, classical composer but also leader of the Scottish neo-folk band, The Whistle Blinkies.

Each main character has his or her musical motif (with Hook's motif the reverse of Tinkerbell's), and Peter's a plaintive melody which suggests a real lonely yearning under all the bravado.

Lustig started dancing when he was four, privately and to the accompaniment of the radio. 'When someone used to come into the room I'd apparently dash to a chair and pretend I'd just been listening quietly. But I was panting, so they'd easily guess.' At five, entering primary school, he scouted out some dance classes, and pestered his parents until they would let him join. Choreographing also started early, 'although they didn't call it that then'.

By the age of 10, already an old-timer in a ballet school in Ealing ('where there were plenty of boys, so I didn't feel horribly outnumbered') he was 'making up dances' for himself and for some of the younger students.

'The first piece I ever thought up was the story of a refugee child, danced to one movement of Dvorak's New World Symphony; very sad.' His teenage dream, shared with almost all his fellow students at the Royal Ballet Upper School, was to join the Royal Ballet itself. But the plans had to change when the school's medical consultants, working on evidence from family records and his own bone structure, predicted (correctly) that his adult height would be about five foot six inches (about 1.67-metre). Not tall enough for the Royal Ballet.

They offered courses of growth drugs - popular at the time - but Lustig's father, whose sister had recently died of cancer, refused to agree because he feared there might be side-effects no one knew about.

'At the time I was mad with him,' Lustig said.

Now, quite apart from the fact his father's fears appear to have been justified, he says his height has helped his career.

'I sometimes wonder what would have happened to me if I'd been five foot ten.

'I'd probably have been put at the back of the corps de ballet at the Royal Ballet and might have stayed there.' Instead, he went straight to the Dutch National Ballet, 'a very tall company' where there was really only one place for him - as a soloist.

It was a company where traditions were constantly questioned and examined.

This meant he had less fear, when he moved further into choreography, of modernising old stories, giving women stronger roles and working with older dancers (a rare situation in the youth-loving British companies).

'Particularly in the past 15 years [in Britain] dance has really become focused on physical attributes.

'But a woman who is 50 is still beautiful, can still dance with beauty.

'It seems such a waste not to celebrate that.' Later this year Lustig will premier John Adams' Disappointment Lake with the Paris Opera, and a version of Cinderella with Singapore Dance Theatre that is set in the public housing estates of a modern city.

Peter Pan: Tuen Mun Town Hall, August 3, 7.30pm, August 4, 2.30pm. Sha Tin Town Hall, August 9-11, 7.30pm; August 11, 2.30pm. Tickets $80-$220 from Urbtix. Call 2734-9009.