Dance: There's nothing like a Dame Ninette

FEW, IF ANY, ballets can have had a genesis as dramatic as The Prospect Before Us, revived by Birmingham Royal Ballet last week after 50 years of neglect. But then, few if any other ballets have been created under the duress of war. It was May 1940 when the Sadler's Wells Ballet set off on a tour of Holland in an effort to strengthen morale under threat of invasion. They were cutting it perilously fine. The company left the town of Arnhem only four hours before German troops marched in. Their evacuation took another five days, including 20 hours huddled in the hold of a boat before they arrived home, half-starved and bereft of their music, scenery and costumes. Yet within weeks they had opened a new season at Sadler's Wells and were giving the premiere of a comic ballet created - with what we now know to be typical grit and defiance - by their director, Ninette de Valois.

Few will need telling that Dame Ninette is now 100 years old and still as sharp as a rapier. Both ballet companies she gave birth to - the Royal Ballet and BRB - have devised programmes in her honour, and it fell to the Birmingham company, which has excelled itself in recent seasons, to revive her glorious restoration romp, The Prospect before Us. The piece is a classic combination of let's-all-pull-togetherness in the face of disaster, and rosy nostalgia for a more glorious period of British history. And it's a hoot.

Based on a true story, it tells of the rivalry between two 18th-century London theatre managers in a setting straight out of Dr Johnson's diary. When the King's Theatre in the Haymarket mysteriously burns down, the rapacious Mr O'Reilly lures the ruined Mr Taylor's dance troupe to his own theatre, the Pantheon. When the Pantheon suffers a similar fate, it's Mr Taylor's turn to swipe his dancers back. It's a complicated story to tell in mime, but the details aren't the point. The joy of this ballet is in its vain, bibulous and otherwise florid caricatures worthy of Rowlandson's cartoons.

There are comic touches of stagecraft, too, such as when the orchestra (playing Constant Lambert's arrangements of Boyce) slow to an unbidden cadence, and an entire dance class peers down into the pit to admonish them. There is a clever stage-within-a-stage scene, in which we watch a contempory ballet flanked by theatre boxes from which dribbling old roues leer at the latest pin-up premiere danseuse. And there's masses of characterful, if not spectacular, dancing. It's almost incredible that this entire staging has been reconstructed from old photographs and dancers' memories. Bravo to Jean Bedells for that - a long-retired dancer who, having played several of the parts in early productions, managed to recall more than half the steps. This painstaking revival will pay dividends to BRB in future mixed bills. The Hippodrome audience adored it.

Of course, ballet can't be allowed to feed only on its past, as a new work by David Bintley underlined. But why our leading creator of narrative ballets chose to honour the mother of British ballet with a piece of foreign religious abstraction is a mystery. The Protecting Veil, danced to John Tavener's "meditation" for cello and strings, follows the life and death of the Virgin Mary as perceived by the Orthodox church in its Feast of the Protecting Veil. Bintley's chief choreographic motif develops the idea of this veil or stole, which is said to have appeared in a vision as the Mother of God spread it over 10th-century Greek Christians to protect them from the infidel.

It makes an adaptable prop for dance, wound and unwound decorously around the arms and neck of the young Virgin, as swaddling for a baby, as a shroud for the dead Christ, as a diaphanous symbol of cosmic beauty and power. At best, Bintley's modern-ballet images achieve a stark intensity that almost (but never quite) match the music's own. At worst - I hate to be flippant, but the idea wouldn't budge - they suggest a sales promotion in Harrods' haberdashery department. Ultimately, Bintley's dance material is too loosely worked to fill 45 minutes; the ballet felt too long. But the icon-inspired designs by Ruari Murchison - a backdrop in gold leaf, a golden ladder rising to Heaven - kept the eye entranced.

In London, the South Bank has been running a flamenco season with a difference, focusing on the music. But it made a concession to dance with an appearance by La Tolea - a gypsy artist, we were informed by the organiser, who is "one of the great dancers of our time". Programming the season from the comfort of his swivel chair, he "knew after 15 seconds on video that La Tolea was the real thing". Sorry? It took me a little longer (but not much) to decide that La Tolea's was the most tawdry flamenco I have seen. She pouted, she flounced, she climaxed every two minutes. But subtlety was there none. Perhaps in future, the South Bank team might consider taking a cheap flight to Madrid or Seville, to see just what there is out there.