Being of a squeamish sensibility and prejudiced by a low opinion of recent BBC drama, I can claim only a superficial acquaintance with Peaky Blinders. So my response to The Redemption of Thomas Shelby, a new ballet drawing on the popular television series about gangland Birmingham during the 1920s, is that of a rank outsider.

Produced by Rambert (in association with Birmingham Hippodrome), it represents the company’s admirable attempt to find a broader audience and move out of the modern dance ghetto – hence presenting the show at the new Troubadour Theatre in Wembley Park rather than Sadler’s Wells. A spot check on the demographic suggests that it succeeded: but will this crowd come back when the programme is more demanding?

With a plot line devised by the show’s originator, Steven Knight, and staging by Rambert’s director Benoit Swan Pouffer, the material is basically a fantasia on characters and episodes from the series, efficiently choreographed in a West End idiom and executed with rock-concert panache. Guillaume Quéau slinks and glowers seductively as the evil but conflicted Thomas, and everything and everyone moves at a lick, with plenty of bare flesh and bloody fisticuffs in the mix. Full marks for energy, if none for subtlety.

I can’t say I enjoyed it – just not my thing – but it’s a solid evening’s entertainment and I’m sure it will hit the spot with many fans as it tours the country until next May.

The Paris Opéra is just about to stage Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling for the first time: I’d love to see what fabulous dancers like Mathieu Ganio and Hugo Marchand make of the main role. Meanwhile, the ballet has been handsomely remounted by the Royal Ballet to open its new season, and it’s intriguing to compare this full-length original production with The Scandal at Mayerling, Scottish Ballet’s slimmed-down version that I saw last May. Some of the wrong cuts were made there, but the episode that seems clumsy and redundant at Covent Garden is the ‘Mitzi Caspar’ tavern scene, which leads the narrative to a dead end and tells us nothing new about the characters.

Yet despite its incidental prolixities and vulgarities, what a uniquely powerful work it remains – a gut-churning insight into the psychology of self-destruction. For the first cast of this revival, Ryoichi Hirano danced the hugely demanding role of Prince Rudolf with splendid confidence and attack, even if he didn’t fully convey the extent of the guy’s gradual degradation. Nor did Laura Morera seem to pierce the darkest place in the heart of the Ghislaine Maxwell figure of Marie Larisch, Rudolf’s infatuated procuress. But Natalia Osipova is electrifying as the heedless adolescent Mary Vetsera, inexorably seducing Rudolf into playing the ultimate sex game, and Koen Kessels conducts a barnstorming account of the febrile Liszt score.

Behind Clorinda Agonistes is a fine idea, only partially realised. In her mission to incorporate her roots in classical South Asian dance into a more mainstream modernist vocabulary, Shobana Jeyasingh has turned to Monteverdi’s solo cantata ‘Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda’. Eloquently sung here by Ed Lyon, it describes a duel to the death between a crusader knight and a disguised Saracen woman with whom he is secretly in love. Jeyasingh’s choreography dramatises their encounter with martial arts bravado and a pulsating erotic undercurrent, thrillingly and stylishly realised by Jonathan Goddard and Jemima Brown.

This segues into a longer sequence showing a quartet of modern Clorindas battling their way through the urban warfare of Assad’s Syria, against a background of news footage and a blandly minimalist score by Kareem Roustom. Filmed by a television crew, they flail around, dodge the bullets, recoil in terror, and unite in resistance, but because their plight doesn’t develop or build to a climax, the scenario soon degenerates into repetitive waffle. Choreographers today need to pay less attention to expressive gestures and more to structure, logic, geometry.