Royal Ballet Golden Jubilee Gala, Royal Opera House, London

A sight to make an old Duke lean forward in his seat

You'd have needed £2,000 to bag a top seat for the Royal Ballet's charity gala for the Queen on Tuesday – and that was the official price, not the ticket touts'. News of this had some renegade critics considering trying to flog theirs to spend a night at the Savoy instead. The fact that none of them did had nothing to do with the prospect of seeing something new in the course of the evening. All but one of this gala's 11 items had been part of the current season, and even Ashton's Birthday Offering (created in 1956 for the Royal Ballet's own jubilee) was exhumed within recent memory for Dame Ninette's 100th. What the evening did offer was a chance to see every single Royal Ballet star and guest star (barring the injured ones) at a single pop. And it can only have been this that persuaded hordes to park numb bottoms on the cobbled Piazza to watch a live relay on a fuzzy screen. Others took advantage of additional freebie screenings indoors at the Opera House. So it was a People's Gala, in its way, and as such it was unique.

The feat of arranging bleeding chunks of ballet into some kind of satisfying whole was raised to an artform by Anthony Dowell in his last years as RB director, thanks partly to his own low-key charm as MC. New boy Ross Stretton took more of a back seat on his first run – a sensible decision in view of the nerves he couldn't quite disguise in his opening address to the Queen. His one minor innovation – using the overhead display to title each item – proved a good one, but otherwise the format was not distinctive.

A huge framed photo of the young Queen in 1952 and another recent image made an opening and closing framework, suggesting that the danced extracts marked each decade in between – a nice idea, but since they appeared in no particular order the theme was hard to discern. The strongest period feel came with Ashton's Birthday Offering – did those crazy tinselly costumes really look chic in 1956? By contrast the same choreographer's Marguerite and Armand (1963) looked bracingly streamlined and modern, in an extract that deftly filleted Marguerite's collapse and death from the rest of the story. Sylvie Guillem never fails to bring a febrile intensity to the role – nor Nicolas Le Riche a stallion glamour to Armand – but this was extra-magnified as both flung themselves into the highest pitch of tragedy without the preparatory scenes. Only Guillem could find such reverberant pathos in so short a space without reverting to melodrama.

Some performances came off better than they did earlier in the season. William Forsythe's helter-skelter take on classicism, The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, supplied both more thrills and more precision at a notch steadier tempo. Darcey Bussell and Jonathan Cope looked more expansively at home in the slow, muscle-wrenching duet from Tryst (the RB's only world premiere this year, by the brilliant young Christopher Wheeldon). And the Lilliputian partnership of Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg yielded such finely nuanced rapture in their extract from The Leaves are Fading that if I were Ross Stretton I'd be tempted to ditch the rest of that soggy ballet from now on.

Other choices were plain odd. Of all the heart-in-mouth moments in Onegin, to select the one dull pas de deux of the ballet – the one in which Tatiana displays her staid, secure affection for her staid, safe husband – was perverse. And though Mats Ek's Carmen brought a welcome blast of lurid colour, in carved-up form it must have looked bonkers to the uninitiated. I'd love to know what the Duke of Edinburgh made of Guillem's lewd, cigar-chewing Carmen, fanning her overheated crotch with her skirt, or of Massimo Murru's Don Jose, caressing an outsize cannonball as if it were a woman's bum. But was he even watching? Fact: you can only see roughly one third of the stage from Covent Garden's royal box.

The fieriest item of all on this starry starry night was also, oddly enough, the most hackneyed. Quite how the Don Quixote pas de deux slipped through the gala's last-50-years rule beats me, but in the hands of sparky Marianela Nunez and Carlos Acosta no one was complaining. The Cuban spitfire Acosta supplies everything the 19th-century showpiece requires: razor-sharp style, outrageous confidence, and the kind of bluff charm that kids you into thinking you could chat him up later in the bar. If I ever did, I would have to ask him the name of that mad, miraculous jump he throws into his second variation – a kind of revoltade with added reef knot in mid air. Even the Duke would have leaned forward in his seat for that.

j.gilbert@independent.co.uk