Fulfilling its sacred duty to serve regions that higher culture tends to avoid, Birmingham Royal Ballet made a midweek visit to the troubled city of Peterborough. Its New Theatre holds about 1,200 and is normally focused on tribute bands and stand-ups; I would guess that for Carlos Acosta’s Classical Selection only about 60 per cent of its seats had been sold or distributed, and predominantly to a white and female audience. Their response was moderately enthusiastic. Arts Council England’s embattled chief executive Darren Henley was in attendance; I wonder what lessons he drew from the performance.

I didn’t feel it quite hit the spot. This is no reflection on Birmingham Royal Ballet’s management, which surely does all it can under intense budgetary restrictions, but there was a sense that Peterborough was being short-changed with something cheap and cheerful. Junior company dancers and apprentices being given solo opportunities that they wouldn’t get in more prestigious venues; no scenery, rudimentary lighting and recorded music – this wasn’t quite the real thing. And rather than relying on the expensive printed programme that few people bought, wouldn’t it help to have a live compère warming up the atmosphere by introducing each number and providing some background (explaining, for instance, the dramatic context and mimed gestures of the 19th-century extracts)? Ballet can seem deeply encoded, a mystery enacted on an altar – a deacon is needed to initiate newcomers.

The evening’s pick’n’mix menu drew on what Acosta had presented at the London Coliseum as a showcase for himself in 2015. The first half was largely devoted to several exacting pas de deux from the standard repertory; the second half was made up of contemporary work. The whole may have displayed Acosta to great advantage eight years ago, but it wasn’t so kind to the neophytes on stage in Peterborough. Too much of what we saw didn’t transcend the academically correct, the slightly cautious, the obeyed rather than the understood. Honourable pass marks to them all, but it’s not just quibbling to crave a bit more.

Frieda Kaden and Oscar Kempsey-Fagg needed to dig deeper into the lyrical ardour that animates Ashton’s Rhapsody. In La Sylphide, Olivia Chang Clarke suggested a china doll rather than a skittering will-o’- the-wisp, though her partner Eric Pinto Cata gave a warmly vivacious account of James’s airborne solo. Maïlène Katoch is not physically cut out to do justice to the melancholy stretches and slow yieldings of Swan Lake’s second act. Only Olympian virtuosi should be allowed anywhere near a flamboyantly vulgar circus act such as the Diana and Actaeon duet: Beatrice Parma and Riku Ito aren’t yet of that gold standard and so the choreography looked merely banal.

So much for the first half. One highlight of what followed after the interval was Lucy Waine’s subtly playful interpretation of Will Tuckett’s engaging setting of Monteverdi’s ‘Nisi dominus’. A lowlight was Ben von Cauwenbergh’s misguided attempt to make meaningful dance out of Piaf’s torch song ‘Je ne regrette rien’ and Jacques Brel’s satirical ‘Les Bourgeois’. Ben Stevenson’s End of Time fulfilled its promise by seeming drearily interminable and there was no erotic charge to Acosta’s Carmen pas de deux.

But what stood out most positively for me was the American-born Jack Easton. In both Acosta’s odd reworking of ‘The Dying Swan’ and a tango number, this coltish Royal Ballet School graduate seemed to be dancing because he had to, not because of what he’d been told or learnt. There was musicality and imagination there, and a dash of personal style lacking among his colleagues. He has just the sort of talent that BRB needs to invest in right now.