What I like about ballet, and Birmingham Royal Ballet in particular, is that it is nearly always good. When reviewing plays, or even musicals, you learn, as a reviewer, to take the rough with the smooth, the good with the bad. With ballet, and certainly with the BRB, you seldom get that inconsistency. Dance companies have an ethos of excellence, of application and dedication that actors and directors in the straight theatre don’t always muster.

For their visit to Cheltenham this week BRB presents a programme of three halves. The first piece is Quatrain, danced by four couples to the intoxicating music of Astor Piazzolla. The music was arranged by Leonid Desyatnikov to some excellent solo violin from the pit. The piece was nicely done to a very fifties geometric form dominating the stage. Much of the choreography was asymmetric but when it did come together the dancing was often a bit ragged and lacked precision. Nevertheless, an enjoyable piece with wonderful music.

Second up was a ballet starter-kit – three short extracts from classic full-length ballets. Matryoshka is a ballet I have not seen and I was very impressed. I guess with a name like Ruth Brill, all the choreographer’s work could be described as … well, brilliant. I really enjoyed this quirky piece and one of the company’s best soloists, Céline Gittens, really shone in the Waltz section. Matryoshka was followed by the Act 1 pas de deux from Beauty and the Beast and the pas de quatre from Swan Lake. Both Jamie Bond and Mathias Dingman were excellent as the Prince and Benno respectively.

The first two offerings were beautiful but what I had really come to see was Façade. I have known this William Walton/Frederick Ashton piece since I was sixteen when I worked as a stage-hand for the Ballet Rambert. That was more years ago than I care to disclose but, suffice to say, it was in the last century.

The ballet of Façade has lost none of its charm in the 84 years since its creation and I regularly play the CDs – both the original spoken version and the suite.

Ballet is often talked about in hushed, reverential tones and taken awfully seriously. Façade, though, is wonderfully disrespectful and laugh-out-loud funny. After the first little cameo, Scottish Rhapsody, I said to myself, “Yeh, that’s my favourite.” Then the Tyrolean milking piece, Yodelling, and I said, “No, that’s my favourite.” And so it went on. Each little three or four minute cameo was better than the one before, played on John Armstrong’s beautifully evocative and witty set with long-johns dancing on a washing line.

I loved the gormless Jonathan Payn in Foxtrot and if I was really pushed I think I would have to say I liked Foxtrot best or Popular Song with the, this time, dapper Jamie Bond and Mathias Dingman again. Or maybe Tango Pasodoble, with an hilarious Valentin Olovyannikov as the smarmy Dago, or maybe . . . The fact is, I loved every moment of Façade – my only criticism being that it was far too short.

The excellent orchestra, the Royal Ballet Sinfonia, under the shared baton of Paul Murphy (Quatrain and Façade) and Jonathan Low and the leadership of Robert Gibbs, like the dancers, never put a foot wrong.

Birmingham Royal Ballet is always a joy to watch and I look forward to seeing them with a sort of childish glee of which a man of my age should be ashamed. But I’m not, I love ‘em.   ★★★★★   Michael Hasted   27/05/15