Must try harder

The Royal Opera House has just set an unexpected world record. Every patron attending the Royal Ballet's summer season found themselves with only a one in ten chance of seeing the cast that had been announced when the box office opened. People who paid as much as £65 a ticket – and had to send the money months ago to be sure of their first choice – found that they weren't getting the dancers they chose. Some of them are rather angry.

Yes, ballet is a hazardous job and every company gets its share of injuries, but the Royal Ballet right now seems worse than most. Possible causes are choice of repertoire, overworking dancers through casting policies, and the quality (or lack of it) in teaching – all of which must end up on the director's plate. Not a wonderful end for Ross Stretton's first year in charge.

His ideas on repertoire are probably the biggest single cause of complaint; witness the almost unanimous critical drubbing of his gala to mark the Queen's Jubilee, consisting of bits and pieces from the year's productions. Next year doesn't look like being any better. First, in spite of claims about enlivening the programmes, he seems to rely even more than his predecessor, Anthony Dowell, on the "safe" classics: compare the number of Tchaikovsky performances announced for next winter and spring with those allowed for modern works.

Mind you, those modern works are themselves a problem. So far Stretton has relied heavily on productions he knew from Australia: many spectators have found them mostly dreary. Personally, I welcomed his choice of pieces by Cranko, Tudor and Ek, but the effect of some supposed novelties has been to make the company hardly distinguishable from others all over the world that do the same hackneyed works.

Repeatedly, Stretton has claimed he is continuing the policies laid down by the Royal Ballet's founder, Ninette de Valois. Not so: the proportions are out of balance and the company's unique heritage is largely neglected. She wanted to preserve not only the classics but modern ballets of classic importance. I suspect that she would have rated most of Stretton's imports in a further category she defined, works of ephemeral interest to balance otherwise ambitious programmes. She envisaged up to three or four new ballets a year and thought two resident choreographers necessary to achieve any real standard of production and avoid monotony. And whatever happened to her belief in the necessity of works with a strictly national tendency in their creation, to give the company a national significance and distinctive character? Without a consistent policy on the production side, she warned, "the organisation will tend to become extremely limited" bringing a general weakness in execution and creation".

Ah yes, creation. Stretton agrees that "new choreography is the lifeblood of any company", but last year he managed only one new work, by Christopher Wheeldon, and next year he again announces only one, by David Bintley. True, he did not inherit strong choreographic talent, but so far neither do we see much sign of using the Opera House's new facilities to build up newcomers. Plenty of one-off little works in the Clore Studio Upstairs, but no follow-up. We need to think of some of the best (Cathy Marston and Matthew Hawkins spring to mind) being given the chance to try reworking on a bigger scale in the Linbury Theatre, perhaps with a view to moving on to the main stage. Meanwhile, why not persuade Wheeldon back again, or borrow English National Ballet's Christopher Hampson? Or both?

As for the "heritage" ballets, let's not forget that they have included Fokine, Massine, Nijinska, Balanchine and Robbins. But even looking only at British creations, the neglect is scandalous. We have a remembrance of Kenneth MacMillan coming up to mark the 10 years since his death, but it won't include anything out of the ordinary, and meanwhile, the Royal Ballet's greatest choreographer, Frederick Ashton, will have only a single short work to represent him. You can see more Ashton ballets from Amer-ican Ballet Theatre (and much praised they are, too). No doubt there will be an Ashton commemoration in 2004 for his centenary, but I am worried about this apparent pushing of him and MacMillan into a ghetto, to be called out on special occasions. What's the betting that we soon start losing some of their best ballets simply through neglect? Ashton's Sylvia, for instance, needs urgent attention while people still remember it.

Meanwhile, what of the dancing? Covent Garden's optimistic and somewhat vague executive director Tony Hall claimed in his foreword to the programme book for the RB's recent Australian tour that the company "is in great form". Yes – such great form that they could only get the ballets on by bringing in guest dancers, including one, from Belgium via Düsseldorf, Amsterdam and Boston, who had no previous connection with the company. And even then one show had to be cancelled.

There has long been a practice of putting on multiple casts for the classics, so that all the principals can try everything each season. Under Stretton the effect of this has been exacerbated by including the same dancers in one modern production after another. If the roles were shared out differently, standards could improve, on the lines that "you will not do Swan Lake this year, so you'll have more time to rehearse your Sleeping Beauty, and you'll have more performances of that to build up the role; then next year you and Miss Blank can swap". Better performances, and maybe fewer injuries too.

One effect of the present situation is that too often a young dancer gets a break in big roles at short notice. With Marianella Nunez in Don Quixote this past season, the result was dazzling; more recently Laura Morera in that same role showed charm and plenty of promise but would surely have gained from more preparation. Likewise, a guest star such as the admirably dramatic Yseult Lendvai from Stuttgart found herself catapulted into Onegin with a ludicrous lack of publicity. Also apropos casting, why do we see such sloppy accounts of, say, Espada in Don Quixote, which are quite outshone by some of the less prominent roles? I could give many other examples..

When Stretton was appointed, he wrote that "The Royal Ballet needs someone to make a difference, it needs a fresh outside eye, someone who respects the company's enormous tradition but is not weighed down by past events". Well, he has shown himself not weighed down; but has he demonstrated enough respect? "This will be the greatest challenge of my career", he added. He can say that again.