Royal Ballet, Royal Opera House, London <br></br> Birmingham Royal Ballet, Sadler's Wells, London

Sexual deviancy and upper-class twitdom. (Almost a perfect match)

Two weddings and a funeral opened the new Royal Ballet season in the confident style of a company in fine fettle. But in Ashton's year, the 100th since his birth, it seems odd that only one of those items - the shortest and frothiest - was choreographed by Sir Fred, the RB's founder choreographer.

What's more, A Wedding Bouquet, created in 1937, is a mere period skit and hardly exemplary of the serious range of the man. Some think it the funniest comedy ballet ever made (though they are surely forgetting The Dream, in which Ashton out-quips Shakespeare). Others, and presumably those Royal Ballet directors who have ignored it for 15 years, consider Wedding badly dated. I was prepared to join the doubters, but in the event was seduced by the subtlety of individual performances and the crazy thrust of the concept.

A gleeful air of sexual deviancy and upper-class twitdom hangs over these Edwardian nuptials. The groom (a smirking Johan Kobborg) has clearly bedded half the women in the room. One of them, Zenaida Yanowsky's swaying Josephine, has sought solace in drink. Julia (Tamara Rojo) has gone bonkers and become obsessed with her split ends. The featherhead bride is oblivious, and the single shadow that flits across Alina Cojocaru's lovely face occurs when she tries to dance with her new husband only to find Julia grimly clinging to his leg. There are additional interventions from a revolting small dog (Julia's pooch Pepe), whose fawning representation by a dancer in a dog mask must count as one of Ashton's more peculiar little jokes.

The sense of arch anthropological study is amplified by Gertrude Stein's maddeningly repetitive text, spoken by a seated Anthony Dowell. In fact the repetitions - endless lists of names and social connections - are a droll mimicry of empty wedding talk, and their tiresomeness becomes funny. Alas, lack of aural clarity undermines the comic effect, thanks not so much to poor amplification but to Dowell's unincisive vocal tone which struggles to cut through Lord Berners' score. Fix this, and Wedding Bouquet will blossom.

The other two works on the bill might seem ill chosen. Kenneth MacMillan's Requiem is a stirring company work set to Faure's setting of the mass, but it was written to commemorate his friend John Cranko. Yet the work's grandeur and solemnity, and the way it plays up ballet's essential tussle between spirituality and the sensual, validate the choice. Requiem also uses lots of principal dancers, and it's good to be reminded of their strengths en masse. Carlos Acosta gives a glowingly warm and human reading of the loincloth role; Darcey Bussell (newly returned from maternity leave) is sleek and sombrely expansive as the Agnus Dei's priestess. Leanne Benjamin, as a white dove descending, is the very image of rapturous purity. Yet the most memorable image comes when the anonymous males of the corps appear each shouldering a female form spread-eagled to resemble a cross. MacMillan may not have been a believer, but such images work on our collective consciousness like a drug.

Bronislava Nijinska's Les Noces (1926) reprises the solemn theme. There's no joy in this Russian peasant wedding, only portents of Soviet tyranny. The piece has become a staple of Royal mixed bills, and the dancers claim it with ferocious authority, stomping through Stravinsky's cross-rhythms with a ritual force. Ashton would be pleased. It was he who persuaded his friend Nijinska, in her later years, to re-stage it for this company, and it's a masterpiece.

There was more Ashton over at Sadler's Wells where Birmingham Royal Ballet, once in situ at the Wells, the choreographer's own stamping ground, was making a rare London visit. Ashton's Two Pigeons (1961) is a great divider of audiences. Either you melt over its tale of troubled young love, sweetly echoed by a pair of live pigeons. Or you grind your teeth and long for something more astringent to happen - a murder, say, or a hanging. Clearly BRB has decided that the way to deal with the saccharine snag is to play the piece 100 per cent sincerely. Any hint of irony and it's a gonner. Plaudits then, to Nao Sakuma, a born Ashton dancer, precise and pretty, whose reconciliation duet cuts through the sugar like a laser, and Robert Parker, who just about keeps his floppy-fringed charm in check as the artist who strays with Molly Smolen's scowling gypsy. Too bad the trained pigeons were off-form. One of them provided unscripted comedy by refusing to join its mate for the final tableau.

The Ashton is paired with Western Symphony, Balanchine's 1954 cowboy turn. More broad grins and cow eyes, but here skins come an awful lot tougher, and the men get a go at some whip-cracking steps. Great fun.

RB opening bill: ROH, London WC2 (020 7304 4000), in rep to 8 Nov. BRB: Theatre Royal, Plymouth (01752 267222), Tue to Sat

jenny.gilbert@independent.co.uk