Mayerling/Royal Ballet, Royal Opera House, London

A little more information than we strictly need

As dysfunctional royal families go, the Hapsburgs of Austria in the 1880s beat them all. To the world, they showed a picture of propriety, to each other, an opened can of worms. Father barely spoke to mother, mother barely spoke to son. So inured was Empress Elisabeth to Emperor Franz Josef's infidelities that she gave him an oil painting of his mistress for his birthday. Little wonder that by the age of 30 Crown Prince Rudolf had developed syphilis, an Oedipus complex, a morphine habit and a death wish. Cap it all with a hushed-up double suicide involving a 17-year-old lover and more than a whiff of political conspiracy, and you have a soap plot more lurid than any you could invent.

All of which makes for an engrossing read in the fat programme book which accompanies Mayerling, Kenneth MacMillan's 1978 three-act ballet, revived last week to launch a year-long season of his works. An engrossing read, however, doesn't directly translate to the stage: the more there is to say in print, the less breathing space for dramatic imagination. MacMillan's, alas, was severely hampered by the mass of information he tried to include.

It's easy to see what really fascinated him: he wanted to explore in dance (as only he knew how), what could have led two enamoured young people to shoot themselves in a Viennese hunting lodge in 1889. As always with MacMillan, the main inspiration is the pas de deux, the moments of soul-baring between two bodies on stage – and there are two or three here to match his most transcendent. What a pity he had to go and build a lumbering three-act frame around them, feeding opera house appetites for lavish crowd-scenes and dressing-up parades, those interminable pretty dances for maids-in-waiting, and saucy ones for whores.

Despite a quite reasonable scenario written by Gillian Freeman, and tastefully restrained designs from Nicholas Georgiadis, it's all too much for MacMillan's fragile brilliance to bear. Two-thirds of the choreography is padding, and some of the narrative devices creak badly, the creator clearly torn between the oblique dance symbolism he does so well, and the need to push the story along. The strain shows too, in some surprising failures of theatrical instinct. At one point we watch three women playing cards for two full minutes, and the emotional temperature duly plummets.

Liszt's music – if you can call it Liszt's, because John Lanchbery has so mucked about with it – reaches sublimity only intermittently, largely because its patchwork structure rules out any organic emotional build. Some of it is 19th-century flock wallpaper, the best (invariably the bits where the orchestration is Liszt's own) is divine, unerringly evoking the time and the placewith almost mystical exactness.

It was clever of MacMillan to include a scene in which Liszt performs for the Emperor (accompanying a love-song, exquisitely delivered by the contralto Elizabeth Sikora). It was neat, too, to use a piano piece for Rudolf's tortured duet with his mother that had been composed by Liszt for that very lady. These historical threads supply some of the coherence the narrative lacks.

Yet over this hit-and-miss groundplan the dancers of the Royal Ballet sketch some superbly in-depth characterisations. Of the two Rudolfs I saw on consecutive evenings, Johan Kobborg's was the more demonic, so unpleasant that he forgoes any claim on the audience's sympathy, Robert Tewsley's more a victim. Bethany Keating as Kobborg's dull bride manages to excite all our sympathy by remaining inanimate; Laura Morera, in the second cast, shows too much spirit to be credible.

Kobborg has the edge in the erotic crescendo of the last two great duets. He and Alina Cojocaru speak the same impetuous language. What they feel – for that instant– is real. This gives their chemistry a toxic edge, and together they get closest to what this ballet is about. The sheer force of physical abandon propels them to the ultimate act of depravity.

Robert Tewsley and Mara Galeazzi, being taller, don't quite hit that pitch: wild-flung lifts and clinches look a bit careful. But I loved the greedy way Galeazzi's gaze keeps returning to the gun on the bedroom table. And Tewsley's eyes – showing all the whites, how does he do it? – will haunt me for a long time.

j.gilbert@independent.co.uk

'Mayerling', ROH, London WC2 (020 7304 4000) to 16 Nov