When Kenneth MacMillan took over the directorship of the Royal Ballet in 1970, the company was in acute financial crisis. Under pressure to make his mark, he took a one-act modernist piece that he had created for the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1967, and bolted two classical acts to the front of it. It was a brave experiment - and it failed.
That the critical assault was inappropriate, and that an artist must be allowed to risk failure, does not change the fact that Anastasia did fail. The original Berlin piece, employing a brutalist choreographic style, is a forerunner of dark, late-period MacMillan works like Valley of Shadows and Different Drummer. It is set in the sanitorium where, from her steel bed, the woman who thinks that she is the grand Duchess Anastasia relives traumatic incidents from her imagined past. The score is by Martinu, intercut with electronic and voice recordings, and the ballet's psychological preoccupations and expressionist style identify it immediately as a product of progressive, late-1960s middle Europe.
Anastasia Mark 2 adds two acts with conventional classical steps set to Tchaikovsky. The first of these acts, set in 1914, shows Anastasia's family picnicking in a birch grove (later changed to a royal yacht). It is charming and uneventful. The second, set three years later, shows Anastasia's coming-out ball in Petrograd, and is formal, dusty and interminable. As Anastasia, Leanne Benjamin seems to be featuring in two completely separate ballets, and it is a tribute to her brilliance that she extracts something like a star performance from both of them.
That the Royal Ballet has scheduled 11 performances seems to reflect either its belief that representing the piece at intervals will somehow make it work - it won't - or an excessive piety towards MacMillan himself. There's a fine, sinewy, one-act ballet gleaming behind all the clunky's accretions, but someone needs to find the courage to wield the knife.
· In rep until May 12. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
