Scottish Ballet

Where are Scottish Ballet heading? They are a brilliant contemporary company, pulling in work from choreographic greats – this triple bill featured William Forsythe's WorkwithinWork, a masterpiece given the right amount of reverence and flair. Then they are a standard provincial troupe, reviving dull classics – Ashton's Scenes de Ballet, a robotic set-piece danced without precision. The final work, Ian Spink's new version of Petrushka, offered few clues: a workman-like retelling of the Diaghilev one act tragedy, it updates the action to modern Russia, has a clear narrative line and appropriately bustling crowd scenes, while ballet dancers pole-dance and ape b-boy moves.

The recent excitement about Scottish Ballet came from artistic director Ashley Page's introduction of less sentimental, daring choreography. Following Rambert's conversion to modern dance in the 1960s, they picked up some Balanchine that they execute perfectly. Forsythe's contribution, a revival of the moment before he broadly abandoned ballet for a radical direction, is instructive. The company are exact, perfect in timing and attentive to detail, each sequence both emotionally and technically excellent. The play in the pas de deux is sensuous, the larger ensembles tight. On this form, Scottish Ballet are world-beaters. But opening with Frederick Ashton's abstract workhorse lowers expectations. The corps are solid, but not perfect, and a ballet already stiff and formal looses impact with anything less than perfection. The choreography is stifling, the costumes embarrassingly stylised. Ashton admitted that he became fascinated by geometry during the work's creation, and it shows as a drab mathematical exercise. Perhaps influenced by Balanchine's almost mechanical arrangement of the corps de ballet, he tried to reflect Stravinsky's score in a series of set-pieces that could be viewed from every angle. It has not aged well, and exposes a company that is no longer comfortable with classicism.

Spink's Petrushka is not a disappointment: there is plenty of bustle in the crowd scenes and a willingness to engage with both the love-triangle at the centre of the story and the new Russian economy. The manic energy of a market-place and the underlying discontent behind the lives of both “dolls” and humans are all effectively portrayed. Spink is less successful in transforming a ballet dancer into a pole dancer – it fails to signify an intended sexiness – and the coachman steps of the original may find a logical analogy in b-boy tricks, but they are not comfortable shapes for a corps de ballet. These are worthwhile updates, but need dancers skilled in the art to be convincing, and leave a patronising tension. Yet the ménage between the three dolls is thrilling captured; the brutality abrupt; the final haunting suitably ghostly and weird. Given Petruschka's status in ballet – the Bolshoi did a version that was visually stunning and emotionally draining – Spink has not discredited himself, without fully re-imagining the story.

If the Ashton can be disregarded – it feels like a sop to traditionalists – this is a four star show, given impetus by Workwithinwork and Petrushka maintaining a holding pattern of gentle experimentation. The actual sequence of the three pieces, from traditional to new, is wise and the company is revelling in a very strong grounding in technique and flair. The Autumn Bill, which has Balanchine and Pastor's In Light and Shadow, promises to be far more representative and interesting.