Not being an aficionado of the heavy-metal genre, I snootily suspected that I would rather be standing in the rain flogging the Big Issue than suffer the racket that goes by the name of Black Sabbath. The noise, my dear, and the people! How could they? So I approached Birmingham Royal Ballet’s attempt to dance to its shenanigans armed with earplugs and gritted teeth.

It wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected: in fact, it erred towards the polite and tasteful, and I wondered if a crowd largely consisting of hairy and leathery old rockers – some of them possibly anticipating satanic rituals or heads being bitten off chickens – got much out of it. The numbers, if that’s what you call them, had been quite sensitively filtered and orchestrated, at a decibel level even I found  inoffensive. Recorded voices of the two most famous members of the band, Tony Iommi and Ozzy Osbourne, were intermittently heard reminiscing: both sounded endearing, and I was amused and fascinated to hear Iommi admit that in his youth he had been a ‘medium’ fan of Holst’s The Planets – it makes sense.

The real disappointment was the dismally uninventive dance. The show is nominally divided into three half-hour sections – the first thematically focused on the creation of the ballet, the second on the story of the band, the third on its legacy. Not that you could tell: they looked indistinguishable. Each had been assigned to a different young choreographer (Raul Reinoso, Cassi Abranches, Pontus Lidberg), none of whom had any idea what to do with the material. The net effect, amid much strobe and dry ice and black on black, was a sort of aimless and mundane hyper-energetic workout, with patches of breakdancing and disco jiving interspersed with simple classroom manoeuvres, all overseen by the guitarist Marc Hayward, embodying the spirit of the band. A posse of BRB’s younger dancers go at it hammer and tongs, occasionally skirting confusion, but they haven’t been offered anything that challenges them.

In the programme, BRB director Carlos Acosta expresses the hope that the audience will return at Christmas to see the company in The Nutcracker. Who is he kidding?

The survival of Petipa and Gorsky’s Don Quixote is a mystery. Nothing and nobody can redeem it from the drivel of its plot or the banality of Minkus’s score – the sort of thing that gives ballet a bad name. Other relics of the 19th-century repertory can always yield some poetic resonance or allegorical ambiguity, but this is just knockabout circus stuff with no soul, art or mind at all, and it beats me to know why or how anything so inane continues to be popular. But tough, it does, and Acosta’s 2013 production for the Royal Ballet sensibly and shamelessly plays it straight down the line as cheerful, colourful entertainment.

Having got this off my chest, I have to admit that the current revival is danced with such exuberant verve that I was moved to gasps of pleasure and enthusiastic applause. Stars of the show on the night I went were Yasmine Naghdi and Matthew Ball as the streetwise young lovers Kitri and Basilio. In recent years, these two have developed a seamless partnership and they simply smashed everything the choreography threw at them – Naghdi brilliantly precise and tireless, displaying a superb jump and effortless balances; Ball boyishly playful and charming, his technique vastly improved of late, his keen intelligence evident even in this rubbish. Adorable. Another bravo to the great Gary Avis, who finds in the mimed title-role a note of poignancy that comes as welcome relief after all the relentless grinning and olé-ing.