Family dance diversions include Alice’s adventures and a flatulent horse

“Family friendly.” A phrase that either enfolds you like a comfort blanket or has you reaching for the absinthe bottle. In London, the Royal Opera House blithely rose above the half-term break, offering a choice between Crystal Pite’s doomy treatise on life, death and the refugee crisis or Kenneth MacMillan‘s Mayerling. The latter is billed as “suitable for ages 14+” but there were still some seven-year-olds in the stalls for Vadim Muntagirov’s superb debut last week. Intravenous drug use, marital rape, rough sex, syphilis and suicide: you can’t help wondering where their parents would draw the line. Meanwhile Sadler’s Wells embraced the school holiday with a choice of family viewing: Jasmin Vardimon’s Alice (on the main stage) and Arthur Pita’s Ten Sorry Tales (at the Lilian Baylis Studio).

The adventures of Lewis Carroll’s dogged, prosaic little heroine have always been box-office catnip — Christopher Wheeldon’s 2011 Alice for the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada has become a cash cow to rival The Nutcracker. Sales for Vardimon’s UK tour of Alice have been brisk, but anyone expecting a design-led extravaganza will have reckoned without this dancemaker’s determination to burden even the simplest narrative with intellectual baggage. Her dismal 2018 Medusa managed to work in #MeToo, anti-capitalism and oceanic pollution. Alice becomes a Trojan horse for her thoughts on metamorphosis, the menarche and the menopause (she missed out “muchness”, sadly).

The soundtrack offers Vardimon’s usual random playlist — everything from Vivaldi to The Swingle Singers — but it looks pretty good, thanks to imaginative designs by Vardimon and regular collaborator and dramaturge Guy Bar-Amotz. The space is dominated by a vast book whose turning pages make for swift transformations. There is cunning use of shadowplay and Andrew Crofts creates beguiling projections. Vardimon’s seven dancers are tireless and versatile and get to showcase an impressive range of skills. Donny Beau Ferris and Sean Moss are impressively acrobatic as the Queen’s guards. Evelyn Hart is a galumphing but strangely graceful Alice, though her story never engages us. The 90-minute string of vignettes aspires to non-linear dream logic but just feels incoherent.

★★★☆☆

Touring to Ashford and Ipswich in December, jasminvardimon.com

Arthur Pita follows the success of his 2013 The Little Match Girl with Ten Sorry Tales, based on the 2005 story collection by Mick Jackson. Jackson’s offbeat, often macabre narratives — a flatulent horse that steals buttons, a contemporary artist killed by his own butterflies, an alien abduction (“Someone’s abducted the aliens!”) — are a perfect fit for Pita’s slyly witty world view.

Frank Moon’s commissioned score supplements recorded material with manic live accompaniment by the composer himself on piano, violin, mandolin, banjo and melodica. Jann Seabra’s designs have welcome echoes of David Roberts’ Gorey-esque book illustrations and allow the versatile cast of six to morph readily into schoolboys, fishwives and bungling undertakers with minimal props and some deliciously creepy face masks.

Each story is punctuated by exquisite little flurries of folk-inflected movement including a deliciously deadpan step dance for Simon Palmer — imagine Will Self doing a Schuhplattler routine. Nathan Goodman delivers a splendid comic turn as the flatulent horse in “The Button Thief”. A dark delight.

★★★★☆

sadlerswells.com