Highland Fling, Sadler's Wells, London

Matthew Bourne made Highland Fling 11 years ago, before he went on to Broadway and West End celebrity.

Matthew Bourne made Highland Fling 11 years ago, before he went on to Broadway and West End celebrity. At this revival, it looks like a trial run for Bourne's Swan Lake: these wild, sooty-eyed sylphs are very like his famous male swans. It's a lively show, but it hasn't the weight of Bourne's recent work.

Like Swan Lake, Highland Fling is based on a 19th-century classic. La Sylphide is a romantic ballet, set in the misty Scotland of Walter Scott. Bourne updates the story to the Scotland of Trainspotting. Again, James falls for a sylph, and is lured away on his wedding day.

Bourne and his designer, Lez Brotherston, have revised their production for a larger company. Bourne starts with the lavatories of the Highland Fling club, the night before James's wedding to the neat, respectable Effie. James takes drugs: his sylph is a fatal hallucination.

Bourne tells stories with brisk economy. Dancers rush in and out, primping, taking drugs, getting into fights. Brotherston's costumes are all tartan, kilts and lurid trousers. James's flat is dottily Scottish, decorated with antlers, tartan walls, pictures of Sean Connery. The television plays Brigadoon.

Bourne has fun with these jokes, but he has trouble stretching them to fill the music, by the Danish composer Hermann Severin Lovenskyold. The best dances, throughout, are those that stick closest to the story. Bourne has a brilliant sense of body language, and he builds it into narrative dances. There's a wonderful wedding march - all the characters prancing forward at top speed, each giving the steps an individual twist. Lovenskyold's score, written for the Bournonville's 1836 version of La Sylphide, has plenty of room for big dance numbers, interludes in the plot. Bourne tends to fill them with random action, and his ballet marks time.

It brightens with the reappearance of the Sylph, a girl in bleached, tattered Highland dress. Her hair is knotted into dreadlocks; her feet are bare and dirty. As James sleeps in his armchair, her arms sneak around his neck. When he lifts her, she leans down on his chest, her feet fluttering. She looks weightless, but she's pressing him, forcing him on.

The second act, another hallucination, shows James in the world of the sylphs. They move in weighted steps, their breath hissing audibly. But Bourne doesn't seem to trust his dances: there are appearances from a soft-toy rabbit to distract us.

Returning to its plot, Highland Fling becomes vivid again. As in the ballet, James wants to tame his sylph, to tie her down. The ballet hero tries to catch her with a magic scarf: Bourne's possessive James simply cuts her wings off, leaving her staggering, smeared with blood.

On opening night, James Leece was an exuberant James, cheerfully gormless. Kerry Biggin is a light, scampering Sylph. As Effie, Mikah Smillie dances with witty perkiness, then cuts through it into sober grief.

To tomorrow (0870 737 7737); then touring ( www.new-adventures.net).