Gyula Harangozo's staging of Bartok's The Miraculous Mandarin may now be revered as a historic prize of the Hungarian repertory - but it had a hard time getting to the stage. Between Harangozo's attempted first production in 1931 and his definitive one in 1956, the work was banned several times on grounds of immorality and modernism.
Even half a century on, it's not hard to see why. The ballet is set in a cheap whore's bedroom - junk furniture illuminated by a sour neon glow - and its story is as simple and nasty as its location. The whore's job is to lure clients whom her three pimps can then beat up and rob. But with the arrival of a rich Chinese man, the routine violence turns unsettlingly weird. At first the Mandarin is inscrutably and implacably resistant to the whore's charms, but once aroused he survives everything the pimps can do to him, including knifing and hanging, in his determination to satisfy his lust.
As danced by Sandor Jsererniczky, the Mandarin exerts a macabre, Rasputin-like fascination as he returns again and again from death. Bathed in lurid green light he moves through the seething brass and percussion of Bartok's score with an almost supernatural poise and mass. It is an image of mysteriously withheld power that Harangozo plays brilliantly against the blustering aggression of the pimps, and for tension and sheer creepiness, the Miraculous Mandarin ought to be a four-star ballet.
Few people in Monday's audience would have seen its potential, though, due to Katalin Hagai's floundering whore. The ballet requires her to be the grubby, vulnerable but compellingly erotic centre of the action yet all Hagai's small stock of technique was exhausted in trying to keep pace with Harangozo's steps. There was no drama and certainly not enough charisma to make us believe a man would beat death for one extra minute of her sexual expertise.
· Ends tonight. Box office: 0870 737 7737.
