When Ashley Page created Fearful Symmetries in 1994 it became an instant company hit, a work whose exhilarating menace not only fired up its audiences but also made the dancers look glorious. However its central role - created on Irek Mukhamedov - always seemed to be a one-star vehicle, until Adam Cooper, returning as a last-minute guest with the Royal, took over the role on Saturday.
Mukhamedov's dark glitter may be impossible to emulate but Cooper has his own style of glamour - English aristocrat turned rough trade -which makes the ballet scintillate on his terms. As a partner he's both technically adroit and hungry and with the witty and joyously sexy Sarah Wildor, he brought a new intimacy and danger to the ballet's long central duet.
The opening work in this triple bill of late 20th century ballets was Mark Baldwin's Towards Poetry which was created earlier this year for the Royal Ballet's Dance Bites tour. As such it was designed for smaller venues, yet the choreogaphy is gorgeously flattered by the stage of the Wells. Baldwin has a baroque instinct for detail and frequently exaggerates the dizzy momentum of a phrase with a languorous rolling of the head, or a delicate scrolling of the wrists. At the same time he challenges the boldness of his young cast with fraught pirouettes and fiercely extended lines. With space to luxuriate in, the dance looks ravishing. What's less well served is the ballet's subtext. Baldwin's scenario of competitive gaming is suggested by the obliquest of gestures and by the emotional charging of the space between the dancers. On a big stage that intensity is dissipated, despite some excellent performances.
You'd need to be blind, however, to miss the incestuous violence which activates MacMillan's My Brother My Sisters (1978), although there are aspects of characterisation which remain irritatingly muddled. As in all MacMillan narratives the choreography is powered by images so visceral they sicken our nerve endings - when the predatory older sister pursues her naive sibling her bourrées are fast and vicious as the sharpening of knives. But too many of the choreographed grapples are clichés of the sex and violence genre, telling us nothing about who these children are and why they're so scarily dysfunctional. Even though Friday's cast performed with fine conviction, we could never travel into the chaos of their characters' imagination. We watched from outside, voyeurs against our will.
