This was very much a David Bintley evening with all three ballets showing different aspects of the artistic director’s imaginative strengths from the hugely popular Still Life At The Penguin Cafe, through the more sombre Tombeaux to the remarkable E=mc2, which opened this splendid triple bill.

The latter ballet  is based on Einstein’s celebrated theory, and Bintley carefully turns a scientific equation into a dance piece that is both colourful and moving.

Halfway though the piece, a Japanese character appears in the white robes of the Japanese No theatre. A red square grows behind enlarging to a thundering musicscape suggesting an atomic explosion. A Japanese tragic figure? A rumbling mighty explosion? It has to be Hiroshima.

The point is made succinctly and indelibly and Bintley notes that Stephen Hawking once spoke of God playing a dice game with the universe - but throwing the dice where we cannot see them.

How this all becomes a ballet is a remarkable marriage of Art and Science and the company danced it well.

Tombeaux is a danced homage to Frederick Ashton, the legendary British choreographer. Set in a green light, it places elements of Ashton’s choreography under the spotlight, and unless you knew the exact choreographic references Bintley was highlighting, you’d find yourself lost in the wood with no way out.

But the great favourite of all time is the gorgeous Still Life At The Penguin Cafe.

This is not Bintley working through arcane choreography or a scientific formula for destruction, this is Bintley the crowd pleaser.

Most people know the ballet with its gorgeous monkeys, penguins, woolly monkeys, auks and much else. It is a ballet with beauty, compassion and colour that is unequalled in dance today and I cheered.