Midnight Express

The big draw for this show was to be the appearance of ex-Royal Ballet dancer Sergei Polunin, but the mercurial Polunin failed to turn up for rehearsals and has been replaced by Danish dancer Johan Christensen. Without Polunin, what's left is a possibly ill-advised ballet based on the Billy Hayes book 'Midnight Express', about a young man jailed in Turkey in the '70s for drug smuggling (later made into a film). Whether the once-acclaimed dancer and director Peter Schaufuss can convincingly turn a gritty prison drama into a credible ballet is doubtful, considering his recent outings on the London stage have ranged from merely laughable to complete travesty.