Imagine: you take your seat at the best restaurant in town, the waiter arrives with a flourish to fill your water glass, you hold it out and he pours. And pours, and pours, and pours and pours. The water spills over the rim and splashes into your lap, down your front, over your head. You are left stunned and sopping wet. It is the most exhilarating evening of your life.

Greek myths are all over theatre stages at the moment, their fierce, vengeful stories offering unnerving parallels with events in our modern world. The latest such project is a pithy double bill of opera and dance, both halves (though the first lasts only 20 minutes) featuring the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, and the havoc he wreaks, even in death.

It would be hard to find an antihero more anti than Eugene Onegin. The protagonist of Alexander Pushkin’s long verse novel of 1833 is a wrecker of lives. Charismatically handsome yet arrogant, cynical and bored, his effect on those who fall under his spell is toxic. And yet in the mid-1960s his story suggested itself as material for a ballet so luminous and compelling that it has outlived its choreographer by more than half a century.

Leeds-based Northern Ballet has built a reputation as a source of fine dancers who are also impressive actors. Federico Bonelli, the former Royal Ballet principal who took over its directorship in 2022, is proving a worthy steward of this tradition. 

The company’s latest visit to London is a triple bill of “shorts’, one almost 50 years old, the other two commissioned by Bonelli. Together they make an extremely satisfying menu.

In an ideal world an end-of-year roundup would applaud only new ventures – fresh productions that you may curse for having missed but whose success would almost certainly ensure a second run.

No new production of a beloved old ballet can please everyone, and there is none more beloved, or more frequently produced, than The Nutcracker. English National Ballet has staked its identity on performing Tchaikovsky’s last, most hummable and most festive ballet every Christmas since 1950, turning out a fresh reading every few years.

How do you refresh a masterpiece? Bringing back his first and still greatest hit, Swan Lake, Matthew Bourne seems to have changed only minor details since its 1995 premiere at Sadler’s Wells. Its core brilliance is untouched.

Those with treasured battered copies of Noel Streatfield’s 1936 story of three young adopted sisters in pre-war London may have thrilled to the idea of a version coming to the National Theatre. But be warned: jolly though it is, it’s not the story of stagestruck pre-war Londoners you know.

Romeo and Juliet or Cinderella? Prokofiev’s two great scores have provided the Royal Ballet with a pair of popular hits, though Macmillan’s R&J has probably been the bigger draw, its Capulets ball music sampled everywhere from TV commercials to Sunderland FC’s pre-match stadium anthem.

London-born Akram Khan has come a long way in a 35-year career. He performed as a young teen in Peter Brook’s production of The Mahabharata, then progressed to dance training first in kathak then in contemporary dance.