The concluding part of David Bintley's Arthur, performed by Birmingham Royal Ballet, starts where Part 1 ended - with the slaughter of the innocents ordered by Merlin, to rid the kingdom of its prophesied nemesis, Mordred. The image of soldiers hacking small children to death immediately flags up the ballet's purpose - which is less a re-telling of Malory's story than the construction of a morality tale about power. However, the work isn't long under way before we're reminded of something else: what a very dull figure Arthur actually cuts within this strange, sprawling epic.
Just as the most flamboyant character in Part 1 was the black enchantress Morgan, so in Part 2 it is wicked Mordred who's clearly seduced Bintley's imagination. Despite fine performances from BRB's dancers, nice, put-upon Arthur is a cypher, as are the hapless lovers Lancelot and Guinevere. It is Mordred, limping and lowering round the stage like Richard III, who holds the evening together.
Unfortunately, many scenes have to pass before Mordred's evil satisfactorily matures, which means that the ballet starts off in the same unfocused, often bafflingly episodic fashion as Part 1. Even though Bintley has stripped the legend to his own essentials (no Green Knights or Holy Grails), the story still lurches from Orkney to Camelot, from Merlin to Morgan to Lancelot, with an abruptness that's hard to follow unless you've been swotting up the programme.
The narrative would feel less unwieldy if individual scenes or characters stood out with more intensity. But John McCabe's score - which contrives to be both disjointed and monotonous - fails to deliver the kind of defining musical moments from which Bintley might fashion more resonant dance images. So even though the choreography is more fluently written than in Part 1, too much of it idles in first gear along the surface of the narrative.
During most of Act 1, it's thus left to Peter J Davison's sets and Peter Mumford's lighting to pitch the theatrical highs - Arthur's round table, for instance, which glows like a spacecraft hovering over the stage. But when Mordred takes over the story, Bintley's choreography (and McCabe's music) suddenly seem let off the leash. Ruthlessly, glitteringly danced by Robert Parker, Mordred's lurching leaps and fascist tics are the stuff of real drama and, in the final, brilliantly staged battle scenes, we briefly feel that the money lavished on this huge spectacle has been well spent.
But Arthur 1 and 2 is ultimately a doomed act of hubris. Even though it contains nuggets of real dance poetry and vestiges of real dance themes these struggle for life within the cumbersome scale of the enterprise. Ballet may have matured beyond the nursery room of fairy tales, but politics and history are not its natural sphere.
Arthur Parts 1 and 2 are at Sadler's Wells, London EC1 (020-7863 8000), until tomorrow. Then touring.
