Long in the tooth

Royal Ballet: Dance Bites High Wycombe

The Royal Ballet cannot afford to tour large- scale productions to the provinces so, in order to make it up to them, it undertakes small- scale tours in the form of Dance Bites, which seeks to provide a platform for young choreographers. The tour also provides an opportunity for the Royal Ballet's enterprising Education department to work with young people from the towns visited, and the result of these workshops is presented at the matinee performances.

It is hugely helpful for young choreographers to stage their work away from the gilded glare of Covent Garden but, on the evidence of the past couple of years, these worthy aims do not seem to combine terribly well with the company's paramount duty: to entertain. Key company names are missing from the Dance Bites squad. No Guillem (as if), no Mukhamedov and, on Friday night in High Wycombe, even Darcey Bussell and Tetsuya Kumakawa were on the subs bench. The only big names on show were Jonathan Cope and Adam Cooper and, if the old clapometer was any guide, High Wycombe was unconscious of their fame.

The work they were given to perform was unlikely to establish them in anyone's memory. The current Dance Bites programme comprises five new works plus a revival of Christopher Wheeldon's Pavane pour une Infante Defunte and Ebony Concerto by the seasoned choreographer Ashley Page. Cathy Marston's Figure in Progress was inspired by the work of Giacometti and danced to Shostakovich preludes and fugues punctuated by Fabienne Audeoud's samplings from the same pieces. Matthew Hart's Cry Baby Kreisler began with Jonathan Cope emoting histrionically at the keyboard of a grand piano. Moments later, Sarah Wildor climbs out of the instrument in a spectacularly unflattering knitted black catsuit and the couple perform a comedy duet of gauche lifts and unlikely poses before tucking themselves up into the piano using the lid as a bedspread. Ashley Page's Room of Cooks returns to the fertile territory explored in last year's Sleeping With Audrey. Both works take Stephen Chambers paintings as their starting point and both use jazzy minimalist scores by Orlando Gough. Room of Cooks features a table, two men, a woman and a meat cleaver. Scenes of love and violence are punctuated by flashes of darkness, and the action forms a continuous, intriguing loop of motive, method and opportunity. One wonders which paintings Page will animate for us next: Dejeuner sur l'herbe perhaps? Or When Did You Last See Your Father? The evening's least successful pieces were Tom Sapsford's clubland drama All Nighter and William Tuckett's impenetrable quartet The Magpie's Tower. It seems rather a pity that Adam Cooper's farewell performances with the Royal Ballet should be made in an ill-fitting white tennis dress and red bonnet.

If the Royal Ballet persists in such a low-key touring programme there is a very real danger that the nation's taxpayers will wonder what all the fuss is about. Without any sexy new work it would make sense to tart up the programme with a few crowd pleasing pas de deux from the current London season - piano accompaniment wouldn't be the end of the world. The bland fodder on offer this year needs a lot more sugar on it to make it palatable.

Theatre Royal, Bath, Mon and Tues (01225 448844)

Louise Levene