DANCE / Take these three steps to heaven

CLIVE BARNES of the New York Post once said that only the Royal Ballet would market triple bills as triple bills. Not any more. These days, its triple bills come with a catchy title. White Hot and Different launched the season last October, and last week The Immortal Hours framed two works by Frederick Ashton and one by David Bintley. Why The Immortal Hours? I don't know exactly, except it has an ethereal air that matches each of the pieces.

Ashton's The Dream was recycled from last season, where it was stuck before The Tales of Beatrix Potter - presumably because the clod- hopping antics of Bottom the donkey have as much appeal for children as the adventures of Jemima Puddleduck. Ashton's version of A Midsummer Night's Dream is a flawless blend of knockabout comedy and classicism in a fairytale forest setting. Leanne Benjamin's fine debut as Titania is set off by a crisp cast, part serious, part comic. She sweeps and weaves gloriously among the fairies to Mendelssohn's music, later falling for Bottom (the endearing Luke Heydon) with the aching sincerity reserved for a crush on a favourite movie star. William Trevitt dances up a storm as Oberon, in his flouncy Green Giant costume, and Peter Abegglen as Puck nearly steals the show. First performed 30 years ago, The Dream has a timeless charm. Maybe that's what the programme title meant.

The real donkeys appear later, in Ashton's A Month in the Country. The piece is based on Turgenev's play about a raffish tutor (Bruce Sansom) who leads a mother (Sylvie Guillem) and her young ward (Sarah Wildor) up the garden path visible from the creamy drawing-room setting. Such fools. Ashton opts for small strokes - little knitted steps and delicate pas de deux - which mesh beautifully with Chopin, so that the piece is understated and in keeping with the languor of bourgeois, late-19th-century Russia.

The three principal players are all ideally cast, and the piece is comfortably balanced. In fact, the drama is carried by its strong characterisations. The artful Sansom is all things to all women: boyish with the radiant Wildor, romantic and sexual in his pas de deux with Guillem. Wildor's sobs into Guillem's cold lap are the crushing cries of a teenager who believes her first love will be the last. And Guillem has a compelling ability to convey what she is thinking: you can read her mind. When her husband interrupts her reverie about her toy boy, she waves him away. 'Leave me alone,' is the clear message. When she slaps Wildor, who is heartbroken after catching Guillem and Sansom embracing, the older woman's agonised expression lunges out with: 'What have I done?', painfully revealing her vulnerability.

Guillem often provokes controversy, because she insists on keeping her own powerful style instead of harmonising with the company. Her way of performing Ashton is certainly different. Her steely strength and deeply arched feet are not built for the little steps at the opening, but these qualities quickly add a new dimension to the later sequences. The depth she brings gives Ashton an enticing Nineties feel, which is bound to upset the traditionalists.

Sansom proves his versatility in Bintley's Tombeaux (1993) as the solo star around whom all the other planets revolve, veering into and out of each other's flight paths in a mystical world. The piece is double-sided, with resonances from classical and neo-classical dance, but William Walton's score enhances the modern thrust. Tombeaux's loveliness lies in its unusual formations (a clutch of girls in inky tutus up-stage and another clutch down-stage along the diagonal), its daring lifts, stylish pas de deux, speedy pas de trois, and sequences for four men in black, body-hugging suits. The planetary metaphor reaches its apogee in the final phase, when Viviana Durante, in a midnight-black tutu by Jasper Conran, spins around Sansom in ever- widening circles like rings around Saturn.

The best way to describe Durante in Kenneth MacMillan's Mayerling is 'lethal'. As the mistress Mary Vetsera she conspires with Rudolf, dissipated heir to the Austrian throne, in their double suicide, and as a dancer she is sublime. Adam Cooper stepped into the huge role of Rudolf at short notice during a recent European tour and has been promoted to principal for his moving performance. What he lacks in physical force he makes up with a finely wrought psychological portrayal: febrile, brittle, neurotic.

The Royal Ballet returns to Covent Garden on 30 May after a tour to the United States.

(Photograph omitted)