Stranger danger

Like it or not, provincial ballet audiences love a story they can hum and any director planning to tour a swan-light, sugar plum-free menu has always done so at their peril. Tchaikovsky isn’t compulsory: a really well-known story, however undanceable, can usually do decent business (Northern Ballet’s extremely silly Three Musketeers is a reliable granny-magnet). But less familiar titles can be box-office poison — as English National Ballet is forever discovering.

When the former Royal Ballet star Tamara Rojo took over in 2012, she immediately set about breaking down the vanilla tastes of ENB’s regional fanbase with a lavish new production of Le Corsaire. The 1856 pirates-and-slave-girls romp had everything the once-a-year balletgoer demands: tutus, toe shoes, tunes. But it played to shockingly thin houses. Last year’s La Sylphide fared slightly better and Akram Khan’s Giselle lured a more contemporary dance crowd. Buoyed up by these promising signs, Ms Rojo decided to risk a three-city autumn tour of Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon to Manchester, Milton Keynes and Southampton, blithely disregarding the fact that ENB had already made an unsuccessful tour of the ballet in 2008. Sales have not been brisk. Pearls? Swine? Possibly, but words like ‘hope’ and ‘experience’ also limped sadly to mind when the ballet opened its heavily discounted run at Manchester Opera House last week.

All the sadder because this is a really terrific revival: handsomely staged, meticulously rehearsed and vividly danced. Mia Stensgaard’s tourably flatpack sets (borrowed from Royal Danish Ballet) are a triumph of understatement: a few sliding panels, a chandelier, a puff of smoke and we can imagine ourselves in a bedroom, a salon or a swamp. Luxury coaching from Anthony Dowell, Dmitri Gruzdyev, Irek Mukhamedov, Viviana Durante and veteran MacMillanist Gary Harris has guaranteed fine performances at every level.