THE death of Sir Malcolm Arnold was announced on the day that Northern Ballet Theatre (NBT) played his cut-and-paste score for The Three Musketeers for the first time. How sad to report that David Nixon's production has gone the same way.

More often than not, your reviewer would recommend seeing the Leeds company's distinctive narrative ballets - hence Tuesday's journey to Bradford, the only northern staging post of the autumn tour. However, this was a lifeless, soulless dance drama; pretty, but as pointless as the tipped swords.

It would have helped if the musketeers of the title had been central to the choreography, but Nixon's adaptation cannot work miracles with David Drew's reactivated scenario, originally conceived for the Royal Ballet in the Seventies, only to be shelved.

The Musketeer screen romps of Oliver Reed, Michael York and Frank Finlay were silly, frilly jobs for the boys with courtly toys and French fillies, and Nixon apes those jolly japes.

Unfortunately, however, this involves the very worst habits of past NBT productions: men in bottom-hugging period couture prodding each other on the arm, pointing at something happening elsewhere on stage and laughing. You can but feel left out of this silent-movie world of political intrigue, where far too much happens in the discharge of secret letters.

Intermittently, Jonathan Byrne Ollivier's Athos, David Paul Kierce's lumpy Porthos and Hironao Takahashi's Aramis display flashing swordplay skills in Renny Krupinski's fight scenes, but who are these pirouetting musketeers? What are their motives? Where are they riding on horseback against a sunset skyline? The characterisation is anorexic, the plot opaque, and much of the musketeers' dancing is exuberant without meaning.

When Nixon's choreography does crave emotional impact, for example in the pas de deux of Patrick Howell's fledgling musketeer, D'Artagnan, and Keiko Amemori's Constance, it strives too hard against Arnold's symphonic sea swell. Alas, only the saucy dancing in the streets of the washerwomen of Paris brings a smile.

These Three Musketeers are all for none and none for all.

  • The Three Musketeers, Northern Ballet Theatre, Alhambra Theatre, Bradford, until Saturday. Box office: 01274 432000.