The Royal Ballet’s latest triple bill at Covent Garden is a curious choice in programme planning, but certainly a vehicle for the dancers’ versatility. Wayne McGregor’s Chroma, revived for its second season, blasts you from the start: curtain-up on a dazzlingly lit set of frames and planes by the architect John Pawson, an explosive eruption from Joby Talbot’s arrangement of White Stripes music, and the silhouetted sight of Mara Galeazzi and Edward Watson transfixed in an impenetrable relationship that will develop into moves so extraordinary, you can hardly believe them – wrestlings and dislocations, capture and escape.

McGregor’s choreographic style of movement – as in his dancing, as we remember it – is both fragmented and sinuous. The ripples he sets up seem to alter the structure of these dancers’ bodies, which we thought we knew well and differently. All the cast are used strongly – a furiously jazzy male trio, contrasted duets for Sarah Lamb and Feder-ico Bonelli, Lauren Cuthbertson and Eric Underwood.

After this initial uplift, we move to the darker zones of Kenneth MacMillan’s bleak Different Drummer, created in 1984, not widely liked then, and now revived. MacMillan’s interest in scenes of outsiders, victims, tortured souls and psyches is focused here on Woyzeck, the hapless soldier of Georg Büchner’s play and Berg’s opera.

Watson, having been so impressive in the abstractions of Chroma, shows unfailing physical means as Woyzeck, and dramatic and emotional subtlety in conveying the pathos and anguish of the character. It is a searing performance, which in itself would justify this revival, and confirms him again as one of the most extraordinary – and entirely home-grown – artists to grace the company in recent years. Leanne Benjamin is affecting, too, and dances splendidly as Marie, the wife he loves and jealously murders, with fine support from Martin Harvey’s brutalDrum Majorseducer, Thiago Soares’s swaggering Captain (a Basil Fawlty look-alike), Jonathan Howells as the sinister Doctor and Bennett Gartside as the gentle friend, Andres. Troops jeté and Thomas Whitehead is a symbolic religious figure with a crown of thorns. The expressionist business unfolds to Webern’s Passacaglia and Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, which, in parts, seems inapposite to the action, but is superbly played by the orchestra under Barry Wordsworth.

So, too, is Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, in Mac-Millan’s 1962 ballet, completing the programme. Some of the choreography for the massed tribe has lost its original thrilling impact through overfamiliarity and a sense of overregimentation. Shall we all jump on the spot now, or squat and waggle our hands? But the second part of the piece, the better one, retains its interest, particularly in the demanding role of the Chosen Maiden, in which Tamara Rojo excels.

From Montreal, the choreographer Edouard Lock’s company, La La La Human Steps, returned to Sadler’s Wells on a UK tour. Amjad, to no purpose I could discern, attempts a kind of homage to and deconstruction of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty. It proceeds throughout an interminable 1¾ hours at an unremittingly frenetic pace – except when we pause for some film interludes of forest flora, people entwined in twigs like a sacrifice and (why on earth?) patterns of golf balls, projected on three disc screens.

Passages of Tchaikovsky’s scores are reworked by Gavin Bryars, David Lang and Blake Hargreaves into an often abrasive composition for piano and strings, in which a melody we know backwards seems, in fact, to go that way. These transpositions left me with one persistent thought: Tchaikovsky knew best. The lighting is self-indulgently tricksy – and the choreography? Most duets look the same: the women in black leotards darting and spinning furiously in the black-suited men’s arms. The motif of the swans’ wing-flapping is tediously overdone, resembling a class in signalling for traffic police. A very tall ballerina, Zofia Tujaka, towers balefully as, I guess, Odette/Odile; then, as Princess Aurora, she is paired with boyish-looking Dominic Santia, who dances on pointe and is himself being partnered by another man. That is, shall we say, unusual.

Also visiting, for a tour, Fabulous Beast, from Ireland, gave their latest dance-theatre production, James Son of James, at the Barbican. This completes the director Michael Keegan-Dolan’s Midlands Trilogy (that is the Irish Midlands, of course). It follows Giselle and The Bull – the three pieces linked by stories of dark deeds in the bog lands.

Here, the prodigal son, James (Emmanuel Obeya), returning to a small community for his father’s funeral, is fêted for an accidental act of heroism, but gets embroiled in other people’s troubled relationships, with fatal results – he is lynched. Fabulous Beast have made much more effect in earlier pieces. This time, the dialogue is weak, often amateurish (as are the songs), the action galumphing and bitty, and the dance element sporadic, frequently based on grappling. Some of the comedy works, but not enough. When James was finally dispatched on a cable, cut off in the middle of a speech of self-analysis, it came not a moment too soon.

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