For their latest programme the Royal Ballet have turned to the British back catalogue, reviving a trio of works by Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan and David Bintley. All three of these ballets haven't been performed for a while, but what also links them is their focus on music, the fact that each evolved from an intense, even experimental grappling with their accompanying scores.
Ashton's attempt to put choreographic flesh on to the characters pictured in Elgar's Enigma Variations generated one of the most singular ballets of his career. With only the most tenuous storyline to get these very English, very Edwardian characters dancing, the stage can sometimes resemble a sepia-tinted photo album, peopled by eccentric gents with excess facial hair, and ladies in wafting tea gowns. Yet at its best this is a ballet of subtle, haunting emotion that goes right to the heart of Elgar's romanticism.
The Royal's performance on Saturday reflected that range. Some of the cameos fell prey to whimsical puffing and posturing and some of the dancing was stylistically coarse, but the central roles - Christopher Saunders' Elgar, Zenaida Yanowsky's Lady and William Tuckett's Nimrod were exemplary. These finely modulated performances were proof of how great dance acting can command the stage, how a simple gesture can evoke a character's world and how a few steps can become a passionate act of musical interpretation.
After a decade of seeing Bintley choreograph story ballets to second-rate music it is revealing to see Tombeaux, his 1993 setting of Walton's Variations on a Theme of Hindemith. The secret, fantastical qualities in the ballet's style suggest he heard something very personal in the music. Dark, inward details scatter into shafts of sudden brightness, the ballet's rapt, central duet is stalked by a sense of fearful premonition. Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg as the lead couple find all this and more, spinning a world of tenderness and danger on Jasper Conran's luminous stage.
The terrors and possibilities in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring are legendary and when MacMillan attempted to master them in 1962 he opted to do so with a pounding rhetoric and scale. Some audiences find his effects breathtaking, I find them fake. It is not merely the forced primitivism of the vocabulary that jars, it is MacMillan's failure to penetrate the work's intimate human core. This is more marathon than ritual and even Tamara Rojo, heroic in the Chosen One's desperate, pathetic, sacrificial solo, can't convince me otherwise.
· In rep until April 16. Box office: 020 7304 4000. 2020
