Story ballets: audiences love them, and so, therefore, do companies, especially stories that unfold meatily over a whole evening. Choreographers, however, have a warier perspective. It’s not just that story ballets are deeply unfashionable with the art crowd, it’s also that they know something the rest of us don’t: that, although choreographing a three-act narrative might initially appear a pushover compared with the highbrow aesthetic of plotless ballet, it is full of elephant traps. You need a well-paced structure, clear storytelling, and dance that doesn’t cry out for a pair of scissors. Then there is, as Michael Corder says, “The sheer physical and mental stamina required.” It took him two years to create The Snow Queen for English National Ballet.

The result was premiered in Liverpool, in what has been a week of story ballets: a week that injected doom in this person’s heart, but in practice turned out a whole lot better. In preparing his ballet, Corder made some astute choices. First, he chose Prokofiev’s third big ballet score, the rarely heard Stone Flower. Then he ditched the weak story line, based on folk tales from the Urals and not liable to strike chords in western minds. Finally, he selected a more familiar story, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, which presents parallels with the Stone Flower scenario.

By tightening Andersen’s original, Corder has come up with a production that works beautifully on a dramatic level. He satisfyingly emphasises the allegorical dimension, the Snow Queen being a personification of winter, unwilling to relinquish her icy grip on the earth. The story flows naturally out of the dance and weaves narrative strands that have poetry and logic. And Mark Bailey’s designs contrast gently verdant landscapes with the Snow Queen’s glistening domain of darkness.

It is rare that an audience spontaneously applauds the orchestra between acts, but Julian Philips’s adaptation of the score, and its performance, deserved it. In fact, the whole ballet brought out the best in everybody. Daria Klimentova, the company’s most classical ballerina, was ideal as the Snow Queen, a kind of polar Mata Hari, with the linear perfection and heartless glitter to dazzle any man. Her victim, Kay, played by Yosvani Ramos, had a youthful warmth that made his transformation into her consort all the more shocking.

Corder’s choreography is good when it’s for groups – the dances for villagers and gypsies, the big classical showcase for the Snow Queen and her minions, like a danse macabre with its slightly demented patterns. Less satisfactory are the lyrical passages with Gerda, the young girl Kay leaves behind. Curving and curling in the same soft groove, Fernanda Oliveira inevitably came across as bland. But her journey to the frozen North with the Reindeer (Max Westwell) was, in its imaginative simplicity, an interlude of sweet magic.

Close by, in Manchester, Northern Ballet Theatre was showing a new Nutcracker by its director, David Nixon. Critics tend to be rude about Nixon, who tosses off story ballets like pancakes. But this Nutcracker, refreshingly traditional in an age of revisionism, wins my support. Nixon keeps the story intelligently straightforward, with linking details to provide cohesion. The party and its preparations in the first act have a naturalistic, interesting bustle, though as ever the hammy grand-parents provide a strong argument for euthanasia. The pot-bellied mice are more comical than sinister, weeping when their swaggering Mouse King is killed; and the tree is clearly enchanted, glowing with rich colours.

I liked Charles Cusick Smith’s sets, especially the one with a moon suspended in inky space for the sledge journey to the Kingdom of Sweets. Nixon may want to rethink some of his own costume designs, though. The rustle of sweet papers in the audience added a layer to Tchaikovsky, but that didn’t put off the delightful Ayana Kanda, as Clara, and David Ward, as the Prince.

A whole world away from such innocence is a rerun of David Bintley’s dark, grisly Edward II for Birmingham Royal Ballet at Sadler’s Wells, based on Marlowe’s play. Bintley might have repeated the success of his other theatre-based production, Hobson’s Choice. But he doesn’t. What happens when a ballet has to resort to visual devices and gesticulation: “What’s this? No! Yes!”? You wonder why there should be a ballet, when there is a play that does it better. And, when the choreography doesn’tlive up to the hysterical designs and story, you get bombast.

Give me instead the Daphnis and Chloë that was on BRB’s other programme, Strictly Dancing. With its humanity and its spare, vivid choreography, as luminous as the sea and sun of Greece, it is Ashton at his most inspired. The whirling climax of massed dancers, colours and swirling ’kerchiefs, and the swell of Ravel’s music, are more exciting than most of today’s choreography. Ashton created the piece in 1951, at a time when long story ballets were only beginning to supplant one-act ballets.

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