Welcome back to London City Ballet – but can they please change their name?

There’s sound thinking behind this summer’s resuscitation of London City Ballet – a medium-scale touring company popular in the 1980s that went bust in 1996. Given that larger institutions operating outside London such as Northern Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet are hamstrung by ever-tightening budgets that leave them increasingly risk-averse, there’s a crying need for something lighter on its feet and more adventurous in its repertory. This is what the new-form LCB under the direction of Christopher Marney sets out to provide, presenting new work alongside forays into the back catalogue.

For LCB’s inaugural season, Marney has assembled a modest but sensible programme, well-rehearsed and crisply executed. It opens with a piece of tights-and-tutu froth conventionally choreographed by Ashley Page in 1993 to the Waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. Quite why this anodyne piece was chosen is a mystery – there’s so much in a similar vein of more substance – but it’s pleasant enough.

What follows is more rewarding. Kenneth MacMillan’s Ballade hasn’t been seen since 1972 – and never in Britain. Three men are in subtle competition for one evasive woman. On a white set in everyday white costumes, the mood is superficially amicable, as friendly negotiations are conducted round a table. But something more emotionally complex emerges as the woman is aerially passed around in a sequence that echoes the second act of Manon.

Arielle Smith’s Five Dances is the first of two new pieces: abstract in style but vigorously responsive to a score by John Adams, it’s performed with muscular energy. More arresting, however, is Marney’s Eve, an anti-pastoral set in a garden of Eden where a slitheringly attractive serpent graphically seduces a naive Eve, whose bite of the apple has spectacular consequences of an apparently positive kind.