A Midsummer of love

Love may suffereth long and it might be kind, but it's also muddling and chancy and more annoying than congestion charges and Tube strikes put together. Love's pleasure and pains, as well as its laugh-aloud good fun, are conveyed in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and David Nixon gives them charming choreographic form in his family-friendly new ballet of the same name.

Frederick Ashton created a brilliant Dream for The Royal Ballet in 1964, and Nixon has wisely steered clear of a straight adaptation. Instead, he transfers its romantic muddles on to a touring ballet troupe, and includes a distilled Midsummer in an extended dream sequence in Act II, an inverted parable of the real-life Acts I and III.

This approach provides both everyday scenes and heavenly ones, with all the lovely design and costume possibilities that go with them. Sadly, the structure gets baffling: a ballet troupe perform a mini-ballet of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is both a Shakespearean distillation and a parallel of the main plot. The costumes are also uneven, with a strong 1940s feel in Acts I and III, but a Spandex fairyland in Act

II. The Merrie Greenwood would have felt righter.

That said, Nixon deserves credit for his choreography, especially the duets. which capture love's sweetness as well as its many mishaps. The four lovers, Helena (Pippa Moore), Hermia (Keiko Amemori), Lysander (Jonathan Olliver) and Demetrius (Christopher Hinton-Lewis), are excellent, the two men lovesick chumps, Hermia a prim Miss, and Helena a poignant combination of rejected sorrow and selfpreserving crossness.

Special mention to the orchestra, who play the Mendelssohn music with flair. And credit, too, to the Act I designs, which brilliantly segue from a rehearsal studio to a train, then segue again into cut-away sleeper compartments, with the nocturnal comings and goings conveyed in a dapper brand of physical theatre.

Until 27 March. Information: 020 7863 8000.