Midweek matinees are the graveyard slot for most ballet companies. Watching a midweek matinee of Hobson's Choice, however, gave a very good idea of why Birmingham Royal Ballet revives this work at such regular intervals. It drew a huge crowd, proving that David Bintley's ballet version of Harold Brighouse's play has almost as much popular appeal as Swan Lake.
When Bintley premiered the work in 1989 he advertised it proudly as "a very British ballet", and its late-Victorian setting is certainly about as sexy as mutton and boiled cabbage. Its storytelling and humour, though, are as broad and forthright as its Lancashire characters, and audiences lap them up.
There is also a surprising amount of dancing for such a dourly moralising tale. Bintley unashamedly plundered the very British repertory of Frederick Ashton when he was choreographing the work: at every turn we are reminded of the eccentric personalities from Enigma Variations, the ugly sisters from Cinderella, the clog dancing from La Fille Mal Gardée, the skating girls from Les Patineurs. In this very balletic Lancashire, the most lavish of all the solos belongs to a stern Salvation Army woman, who spins and arches her back with the Gypsy flourish of Kitri in Don Quixote.
Bintley took his comic inspiration from the silent screen - Chaplin for the daffy boot-hand Will Mossop, a generic type of slapstick villain for Hobson - but here his borrowings are less successful. Most of his knockabout material lacks timing and wit. Jonathan Payn's performance of Hobson didn't help: Payn not only looks too wide-eyed and healthy for a middle-aged drunk, but he has no talent for projecting complicated emotion. Malice, power, humiliation and frustration do not register in his repertory of blustering farce.
However, the ballet is given a massive leg-up by the pairing of Isabel McMeekan and Robert Parker as Maggie and Mossop. McMeekan's starchy bossiness stops just the right point short of tiresome, and she delicately conveys Maggie's inarticulate belief that there has to be more fun to life. Parker, meanwhile, is the best Mossop I have seen. His awkwardness isn't cringe-makingly goofy, but of the mild and dreamy kind, and it comes larded with such wistful charm and humour that you understand exactly why Maggie thinks he is such a catch. I have never been this ballet's greatest fan, but I watched these lovers with exactly the same fond and hopeful grin as everyone else.
At the Lowry, Salford (0161-876 2000), June 12-15, then touring to Plymouth.
