Nureyev deserves better: Nureyev – Legend and Legacy, at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, reviewed

I was never Rudolf Nureyev’s greatest fan. I must have seen him dance 30 or 40 times, starting with a Bayadère in the mid-1960s, and while his sheer presence remained so potent that he was always exciting to witness, I became increasingly aware of how fiercely willed his dancing was – a struggle with or against his own body, almost self-punishing (he believed that he performed at his best when he was totally exhausted). His final appearances, when he was showing symptoms of the Aids that killed him in 1993, were truly painful to watch on that score. He really had nothing left to give, but the compulsion remained.

Closer to my heart was his near-contemporary Anthony Dowell, with his noble modesty and feline beauty of line; and then came his younger compatriot Mikhail Baryshnikov, whose technique was far superior and whose art was infused with a joyful insouciance more appealing to me than Nureyev’s ferocious Tartar intensity. They were lovable; Nureyev you could only worship.

What an ego, what a personality, however – and it should be said that despite his hellraiser reputation, he was a highly disciplined professional and his colleagues generally adored him. Born to be the centre of attention, he was blessed with what is commonly called charisma and a face as dangerously beautiful as Garbo’s: you simply had to watch him, even if he was standing at one side and some fabulous ballerina was spotlit. Nobody could make an entrance like he did – a quality Ashton exploited in Marguerite and Armand, where he burst on to the stage at a breakneck run, suddenly halted, then froze in a pose of palpitating ardour. And even though he was not that spectacular airborne, objectively analysed, he could make you think that he was (Nijinsky, one suspects, had the same trick).

In any case, like him or not, he has become ingrained in the mythology of ballet, as this gala Nurevev: Legend and Legacy, curated by Nehemiah Kish, set out to demonstrate. It was a sincere and courageous effort to honour this dieu de la danse, but like so many of these ad hoc affairs it was hampered by endless rounds of clappity-clap, last-minute substitutions, an absence of any real thematic coherence and a shortage of money – with the orchestra perforce located on stage behind a scrim, there were no backcloths and only very restricted lighting. The result looked inelegant and did the dancers no favours.

Nureyev’s limited talent as a choreographer was showcased in the tasteless solo that he devised for himself in his productions of The Sleeping Beauty – a typically busy affair, overburdened with ostentatiously complex steps, faithfully reproduced here by Guillaume Côté. Even worse were his horribly vulgar reworkings of Soviet warhorses like the Gayaneh pas de deux and the Laurencia pas de six, which even Natalia Osipova’s brash brilliance couldn’t redeem. Including a passage from one of Nureyev’s full-length original ballets from Paris, unfamiliar to London audiences, would have made the programme more representative.

Iana Salenko and Xander Parish (the British dancer who joined the Mariinsky from the Royal Ballet and has migrated to Oslo since the Ukraine invasion) offered a disappointingly flat account of the exquisite Bayadère Act Three pas de deux, and William Bracewell and Francesca Hayward couldn’t make much of the Act Two Giselle pas de deux in this prosaic context either. With Natascha Mair and Vadim Muntagirov contributing a Sleeping Beauty pas de deux as well, the classics were over-represented.

A few consolations made the evening worthwhile, notably Francesco Gabriele Frola’s fleet footwork in Bournonville’s enchanting Flower Festival in Genzano; Alina Cojocaru dancing with sublime understated eloquence in an excerpt from John Neumeier’s Don Juan alongside Alexandr Trusch, an intriguing Ukrainian based in Hamburg; and Cesar Corrales and Yasmine Naghdi fizzing through the camp bravura of Le Corsaire pas de deux to send everyone home happy. But Nureyev was about so much more than this suggested.