Dance: Alice in Wonderland, Coliseum, London

Alice through the Eye of Sauron

Tchaikovsky wrote scores for three full-length ballets. At least, he thought he did. What he can't have imagined when he died in 1893 was that, more than 100 years later, his back-catalogue would be plundered in the service of Alice in Wonderland.

It's not such an outlandish match. Lewis Carroll and Tchaikovsky were almost exact contemporaries. Both lives were shrouded by controversy and suspicion. Both men suffered for their pronounced lack of interest in women. Both sought solace in the imaginative world of childhood. Indeed, there are moments in Derek Deane's 1995 Alice for English National Ballet when the limpid simplicity of a melody from Tchaikovsky's Album for the Young so perfectly chimes with the character of Carroll's heroine that you'd believe they were made for each other.

The trouble with Carl Davis's patchwork job is its lurching sense of scale: the symphonic buffetings of The Tempest set next to slender pieces intended for parlour piano. Somehow, you feel, Tchaikovsky would have smoothed out the bumps. Visually, too, the production is patchy. In Sue Blane's designs, some of the original Tenniel illustrations leap vividly from the page: the duchess with her pendulous jowls, the giddy Mad Hatter and glutinous mock turtle. There are terrific collage backdrops composed of Victorian scraps - bits of lace and wallpaper such as Alice Liddell might have stuck in her album. But the crucial down-the-rabbit-hole sequence is badly bodged, a mess of undulating panels, flapping fabric and a light at the end of the tunnel that looks disconcertingly like the Eye of Sauron.

Given the episodic nature of the story, dance fares rather better than you would expect - Deane's choreography successfully merging one incident with another and giving Alice (the tiny, tireless Venus Villa) plenty of dance interaction. The one drawback of this involvement is that it makes the girl smile too much. It may be hard to pirouette thunder-faced with a cartoon duchess, but my memory of the book is that Alice was scandalised by the duchess's rough handling of the pig-baby. Villa alternately grins and simpers, missing the point entirely. She treats everything she meets the way she might a domestic pet, albeit sometimes a naughty one. The pot-smoking caterpillar, the scary melee of animals in the pool of tears, the mangy Cheshire cat that leaves its hideous grin in a tree, all are sharply characterised but none provokes anything but smiling.

As with all full-evening ballets, Alice demands opportunities for the corps, and where these don't exist Deane has to invent them. The first act slumps badly in the overlong set-piece for two Tiger Lilies and their entourage of Pansies (yes, I'm afraid so). I guess the idea was to echo The Nutcracker's "Waltz of the Flowers", but it lacks sufficiently interesting choreography to earn its keep. There's a more successful nod to The Nutcracker in the caterpillar's solo, danced to Davis's pastiche of that ballet's slinky music for the Arabian dance, given with nicely hushed restraint by the ENB Orchestra under Martin West.

With the entry of the fiery Queen of Hearts in Act II, the ballet not only maintains a sprightlier pace, but incorporates big numbers more easily. An extended ensemble for playing cards in witty square tutus is beautifully worked, forming long diagonal paths down which the main characters canter at full pelt - all thrillingly done. One of the jewels in English National Ballet's rather sparse crown at present is the Georgian dancer Elena Gludjidze, whose Queen of Hearts has the glamour of Nicole Kidman in an ad for Chanel, plus the temperament of a tornado and a dance technique to match. I could have watched her tantrums all night.

Likewise the "Dream Alice" of the company's other great stylist, Daria Klimentova, whose technical quality, along with that of Dmitri Gruzdyev's Knave of Hearts, makes sense of a long, interpolated classical pas de deux that would've made Lewis Carroll blink but is deemed essential here. "Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the dance?" runs the Lobster Quadrille, nonsensically, at the end of the book. Perhaps Carroll wouldn't have been so very surprised after all.

Jenny.gilbert@independent.co.uk

'Alice in Wonderland' (0870 145 9200) ends today; the ENB season continues with 'Giselle'.