What use is a degree in Eng lit? (Ah, good, my parents are in.) Well, it certainly helped with this week’s works, based on Tennessee Williams, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. When choreographers distil a stage tragedy or Russian novel into one intense act, exposition is junked; instead, febrile new works by Javier De Frutos and Kim Brandstrup seize on characters in turmoil and leave us to join the dots.

De Frutos, the director of Phoenix Dance Theatre, is hooked on Tennessee Williams. Blue Roses (premiered at Sadler’s Wells) stages motifs from The Glass Menagerie to a recording of the playwright’s own voice. This is a coup: Williams’s restrained, slurred reading boasts sighing Southern vowels, but a tough core. It’s a voice that insists reverie isn’t self-indulgent. The choreographer, however, makes a superfluous gentleman caller to Williams’s delicately damaged household; flurried movement, hugging the vocal rhythms, scribbles restlessly over the characters. The best touch is a double vision of the smothering mother, two dancers fluttering lilac skirts and twisting inquisitorial necks in an excess of maternal suffocation.

De Frutos has refashioned Phoenix into a vibrant company for neglected American classics and his own spry work. This spring’s rediscoveries are by the Mexican-American choreographer Jose Limon. Scrupulously revived, Chaconne (1942) and The Moor’s Pavane (1949) were sombre, worthy enterprises. The Moor’s Pavane gravely condenses Shakespeare’s Othello to 20 minutes, tragedy accruing during a courtly quartet to Purcell. Masculine rivalry is at its heart: Iago (Franklyn Lee), sweaty with opportunity, performs an insinuating weave around his general’s shoulders; Othello (David Mack) tries to sweep away doubt with a powerful arm. Tiziana Fracchiolla is terrific as Iago’s wife, in flame-coloured taffeta: richly knowing, but still suckered by her husband’s perfidy. Limon’s solemnity dates him, but there’s no excess gravity in De Frutos’s flirty-dirty Paseillo, which was in great shape. Dancers pursue snatched, panting intimacies: you can almost feel their warm breath on the back of your neck.

Dostoevsky is as essential to Brandstrup as Williams is to De Frutos. He responds to the conflicted characters, their tug of ideals and violence. For the Royal Ballet, he unearths initial sketches for The Idiot and an unproduced film score by Prokofiev, orchestrated by Michael Berkeley. Brandstrup constructs an unrequited love triangle from these muddy contradictions: Rushes, sub-titled Fragments of a Lost Story, is layered, compulsively grown-up dance.

Prokofiev’s music is spiky with sorrow, and the design team cleverly blends scratchy silvered projections with a constructivist edge to suggest the central trio are trapped in their own film: raw, monochrome. A guy (Carlos Acosta) is enthralled by Laura Morera’s unhappy tease, but ignores his own moth-grey admirer (Alina Cojocaru). While the corps patters redundantly in the background, the central trio are devoured by such mismatched motives, their duets more like solos that happen to collide. Nobody knows what to do with their hands: they grab, hover, ball into fists or curl away from contact. Acosta’s athleticism becomes a desperate attempt to shake off his frustration: he wheedles, bullies, while Cojocaru caresses the space he leaves behind. Even as he wraps himself round Cojocaru, it’s clear they are on different tracks: he settles for comfort, she convinces herself her dreams are fulfilled.

A neatly constructed bill opened with Balanchine’s Serenade (1934), an early masterpiece that creates poetry through sheer speed and focus. A rapturous collage of Romantic ballet motifs dandles shreds of narrative, but they never join up: it’s all obscure desire and dance patterns. A swoon-some Marianela Nuñez led this gentle, sunny account, far more confident than New York City Ballet’s recent London showing. To close, we had the bizarre pageant Homage to the Queen, created for the coronation and substantially reupholstered in 2006. The elements assemble to venerate the monarchy, any irony swamped by Malcolm Arnold’s plush score. Ashton’s original Air segment caps new pieces, of which Michael Corder’s rippling Water sequence out-1950s the 1950s. Homage shouldn’t be staged so much as served on a doily like mixed fancies.

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