Birthday Offering/A Month in the Country/Les Noces, Royal Ballet triple bill - Seven magazine review Outgoing Royal Ballet director Monica Mason used her final mixed bill to celebrate her predecessor Frederick Ashton's genius: classicist (1956"s Birthday Offering); storyteller (1976"s A Month in the Country) and a director of taste (the Royal Ballet's 1966 resurrection of Bronislava Nijinska's Les Noces). Birthday Offering, the fruit of countless "private lessons" with Marius Petipa's Sleeping Beauty, looked undercast and under-rehearsed. Helen Crawford was bright and clean in her variation and Sarah Lamb swooped through the Beriosova solo, but it was hardly the bevy of ballerinas that Ashton intended. If it can't be cast to the hilt, then it shouldn't be scheduled. Natalia Petrovna isn't a natural role for Zenaida Yanowsky but she brings a nervy languor to Turgenev's self-absorbed beauty. Rupert Pennefather partnered and danced smoothly but lacks the artless grandeur that would enable a shy family tutor to electrify a household. Without this charismatic focus, the tragedy skates close to farce - nobody laughed when Lynn Seymour ran weeping from the room. Emma McGuire, a revelation as the jilted Effie in La Sylphide, showed off her Bournonville-burnished feet and waspish charm as Vera, the heroine's vengeful ward. Stravinsky's Les Noces, made for Diaghilev in 1923, topped the lot. Building on the ruins of her brother's Rite of Spring, Nijinska and her designer Natalia Goncharova show the preparations for a peasant wedding: a dark ritual in which the bride (Christina Arestis) is prepared for a life of suffering by the chorus's implacable mass.