A last dose of vitamin D before the clocks go back: Royal Ballet’s triple bill reviewed

Were those gerberas in Francesca Hayward’s bouquet on opening night? Gentlemen admirers take note: no woman, ballerina or otherwise, has ever welcomed a bunch of gerberas. Hayward deserved better for her adorable Dorabella in Enigma Variations. In white flounces and gathered bloomers she lighted the stage with sprightly sweetness in Frederick Ashton’s one-act ballet set to music by Edward Elgar.

The moment: Edwardian. The mood: lamentation in the drawing room. The look: tweed, knickerbockers, pipes, monocles, moustaches held on with glue. Julia Trevelyan Oman’s designs set us at a country-house party — William Morris wallpaper, parlour games, cold tea — in a palette of somnolent drabness. There was handsome dancing by Laura Morera, Beatriz Stix-Brunell, Olivia Cowley, Itziar Mendizabal, Reece Clarke and Matthew Ball as Elgar’s circle, but it was all rather bloodless and snoresome.

The evening’s triple bill opened with the pep and pizzazz of Kenneth MacMillan’s Concerto: three abstract movements in Sunny Delight colours set to Shostakovich, a last dose of vitamin D before the clocks went back. Anna Rose O’Sullivan and Marcelino Sambé danced the first movement: she with pearly precision, he with beaming brio and immense presence. He is not tall, but his shoulders and his stately carriage boost him another foot. In his spins, he unravels like a strip of orange peel. If you could bottle him you’d make a fortune: essence of strength and youth.

Lauren Cuthbertson and Reece Clarke were a less successful pairing in the second movement: she immaculate, he tall and smooth as a stick of celery. In the third movement, Fumi Kaneko was a peach. She dances with lovely subtlety. Always watch her feet: angelic ankles.

Best wishes to Steven McRae, who strained his Achilles tendon dancing Manon’s Des Grieux and was replaced in Raymonda Act III by Vadim Muntagirov.