Scottish Dance Theatre, The Place, London

From Nessie to messy

Janet Smith has pulled Scottish Dance Theatre up by its bootstraps since she took over as director in 1997. The Dundee-based company now enjoys a higher profile and favourable press coverage as it tours the British Isles. Its eight dancers are young, polished and physically alluring. They slot smoothly into a contemporary dance package moulded in Smith's own accessible choreographic style and designed to appeal to a broad cross-section. SDT deserves to be promoted to Scotland's premier contemporary ensemble, rather than be diminished by competition from Scottish Ballet, which is in the process of being rebranded as a kind of northern Rambert.

That said, the opening double bill for London was only half-successful. Smith's High Land was the good news, quintessential company material that combines an outsider's take on the tourist clichés of Scottish life with the irreverence of an adoptive insider. A cuddly Nessie toy starts the piece, casting coy, come-on glances that invite us on a stroll through landscape and culture. It is entirely pleasant to coast along the path of undemanding, pleasingly constructed dance and gentle jokes, all buoyed up by Gaelic song and Christopher Benstead's catchy music.

A male foursome is interrupted by rain and plastic macs; a woman transforms her balloon into bagpipes; and, just as you are wondering about Highland sword-dancing, four figures lie down in a cross formation to oblige a bouncy soloist and launch a boisterous ceilidh. Smith alternates the sense of scale beautifully, zooming in on small, intimate moments, then expanding out to embrace a crowd or suggest great vistas.

Phyllis Byrne's elegantly deconstructed kilts cut such a swagger, they ought to get star billing on any fashion catwalk. The same designer's fantasy-land clothes for the second piece, Daddy I'm Not Well, are something else. Smothered in bizarre layers from a rummage sale, (fake) fur and Lapland boots, the four performers act out their Neanderthal family conflicts in a setting more creakily sci-fi than an episode of Star Trek. Or maybe the organic shapes – a pair of dangling sacks like pendulous gonads, womb-shaped rhomboids – are meant to evoke some inner country. Either way, Jan De Schynkel's dysfunctional family is earnestly advertised as inspired by Sophocles, Aeschylus, Francis Bacon and TS Eliot, and portentously accompanied by snatches of Bach's "St Matthew's Passion".

The goings-on make life with the Addams family look healthy, and half-way through, I started to think it was a comedy, but not so. A victimised son, a daughter and their parents engage in cycles of torment and comfort through ponderously literal choreography and clunking metaphors. We all knew from previous pieces that De Schynkel had an eccentric imagination, but with this aberration his ambition outstrips his skills.

Touring to 25 May