There are passages of considerable eloquence in Royal Ballet's The Winter's Tale

There’s no escaping Christopher Wheeldon – a modest, amiable fellow from Yeovil of whom anyone’s mum would be proud. Reaching outside the ballet bubble, his stagings of An American in Paris and the Michael Jackson musical have wowed the West End, Broadway and beyond. My guess is that his take on Oscar Wilde, to be premiered in Australia later this year, will soon travel north, too. Next season the Royal Ballet will revive his box-office smash Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as well as a programme drawn from his plentiful short pieces. Two summers ago, he presented us with an adaptation of the novel Like Water for Chocolate (not so tasty). And if that wasn’t enough, here is a revival of his version of The Winter’s Tale, first seen a decade ago.

Neither Ashton nor MacMillan seems to get as much exposure as the prolific Wheeldon, who can be relied upon to put on a good show and bring out the best in dancers even when his choreography sinks to the competently mundane. Bouncing off Joby Talbot’s brash Bernsteinish score, The Winter’s Tale is more ambitious than that, and boasts passages of considerable eloquence, most of them in an imaginatively conceived first act exploring Leontes’s irrational jealousy and Hermione’s adamant innocence. A second act in a bucolic Technicolored Bohemia is overstuffed with protracted bursts of cod-Balkan-peasant merry-making; the final scenes of reconciliation are merely a bit anti-climactic. The excision of 15 minutes would tauten the drama overall, and I think Wheeldon needs to be less literal in his story-telling.