Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev are blessed with talents placing them among the world’s greatest of today’s dancers. But based on last week’s shudderingly embarrassing West End season, one virtue is absent from their considerable endowments - common sense.

Three contemporary dance makers, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Ohad Naharin and Arthur Pita, all currently producing good stuff elsewhere, clearly felt Christmas had arrived when faced with raw material like these two.

Out with classical ballet and in with “Let’s do it how I feel”. Between them the so-called radical threesome did a wonderful job of eradicating Swan Lake or Giselle, but boy, did they throw out the baby with the bathwater. 

When rehearsing Cherkaoui’s Mercy and its static but violent physical abuse of her by him, did the pair never wonder where the word “dance,” classical or modern, fitted in? 

His solo, and this is a man who brings audiences to their feet around the world, was a second rate gymnastic demonstration, much of it lying down, for goodness sake!

In my notebook I asked myself, are the promoters selling tickets on the back of “greatest dancers in the world?” If so where are they? The couple were locked into a world of their own, or rather Cherkaoui’s, and very boring it was, too.

In Ohad Naharin’s Passo, thoughts of years of training, battling to achieve perfection passed through my mind as they hopped around on their haunches twiddling their fingers under their chins like cartoon bunnies in Watership Down.

A theme was beginning to emerge, however, women getting their own back on men, a cause espoused on many an adolescent university campus. I longed to lose myself in the love of dance I usually enjoy in Osipova and Vasiliev’s performances, but such bourgeois tendencies were severely dealt with in Arthur Pita’s Facada.

Camp was the incentive, a usually delightful way to cock a snook at society but by now it was too late. Nervous husband-to-be Vasiliev escaped screaming from marriage to a white veiled Osipova. She was transformed into a scantily dressed siren whose revenge was death. She danced with glee on his grave as the curtain fell.

As the couple failed to sense disaster before the curtain rose at all, my advice to them is sack your manager at once.

Solo For One by Natalia Osipova & Ivan Vasiliev, London Coliseum, London WC2 (run ended).