When the Ballets Russes first presented Fokine’s Polovtsian Dances at Covent Garden in 1911, such was its orgiastic savagery that ladies in the audience were said to be genuinely terrified that its grease-painted warriors were about to leap off the stage and ravish them. The Mongol Khan, a great hit imported from Ulan Bator, may not induce genteel screaming, but it has some awe-inspiring moments and belongs in the same ersatz orientalist tradition as Fokine’s ballet – primitive Asiatic culture made colourfully palatable to western tastes.

I’m curious to know who put the money up for a production that must be costing millions

It is based on a 1998 play by Lkhagvasuren Bavuu, the ‘People’s Writer of Mongolia’, about a violent dynastic struggle among the Hunnic tribes that flourished, mythically at least, around the beginning of the Christian era. The passages of dialogue we hear, adapted for London by Timberlake Wertenbaker and surtitled, are played out in Mongolian and enacted by native actors in flamboyantly semaphored style, but a plot revolving round babies swapped at birth and vengeful psychopaths roaring their heads off is frankly not that engaging. The pre-recorded music is a horrible mix of bang, clatter and kitsch.

What registers more strongly is a gorgeous Bollywood spectacle that fills the stage of the Coliseum, doubling up on the excesses of Matcham’s Neronian auditorium. Amid much dry ice and rock-concert lighting, a rigorously drilled corps of 48 moves around the actors in military formation, wearing fabulously rich and strange costumes and executing what the programme describes as ‘an abundance of horse-like movements, intricate hand gestures, beckoning motions, and a wealth of chest movements’ (whatever they might be). There are some displays of martial art and acrobatic tumbling, and the whole floor show is brilliantly organised.

But it does go on a bit (a 45-minute first act, an 80-minute second one), and it is all very broadly brushed – one longs in vain for a moment of repose. I’m also curious to know who put the money up for a production that has been substantially restaged for London and must be costing millions. Is some trade deal with Mongolia in the offing? Is Mongolia the next big thing?

A second look at Wayne McGregor’s The Dante Project, first performed by the Royal Ballet in 2021, proved largely disappointing. McGregor draws on the tripartite structure of the Divina Commedia, but shows strangely little interest in its spiritual journeys into either ‘Inferno’s vortex of increasing darkness and sin or ‘Paradiso’s ascent into the ethereal sublime. What we see instead is a suite of dances in his customary agitated and hyperactive style, offering little in the way of distinctive characterisation or the meditative serenity so germane to Dante’s poem: tempo adagio is crucially lacking.

Thomas Adès’s score – Liszt quoted extensively in ‘Inferno’, Messiaen in ‘Paradiso’ – is graphically coloured and exuberant. Tacita Dean’s designs are flatly unimaginative: sludgy in ‘Inferno’ and distracting in ‘Paradiso’, thanks to a film screen placed high above the dancers.

On the first night of this revival, the ensemble looked a degree under-rehearsed – there was a lot of rushing about and making it just in time. William Bracewell and Gary Avis struggled manfully to make sense of the figures of Dante and Virgil as observers rather than participants; Calvin Richardson and Anna Rose O’Sullivan shone briefly as Ulysses and Dido, imbuing the nervous jerkiness of McGregor’s choreographic vocabulary with emotional expression.

The best of the evening comes in ‘Purgatorio’, more sensitively and elliptically treated as a pastorale of Dante’s childhood, with haunted Jewish chanting as its soundtrack and a set focused on a silvery photographic image of a jacaranda tree. The mood here turns quieter, calmer, tonally more subtle. I only wish McGregor could have made something numinous of the appearance of the adult Beatrice (Fumi Kaneko). How magically Ashton might have handled it!