Not a single Arbroath smokey. No haggis and neaps. Not even nourishing porridge! Scottish Ballet, making a brief foray at the weekend to the south – indeed, to the South Bank – brought a programme of two dubious servings of Americana and some re-heated 1930s tunes. Not the feast we might have hoped for, and little indication of what ballet in Scotland may mean. The American pieces were, variously, frightful. Stephen Petronio’s made-for-the-troupe Ride the Beast is characteristically frantic, a scrum for its 13 dancers in their curiously tattered and amusingly gnawed costumes (by Benjamin Cho). Bodies race and collide and battle and cling and part and rush tirelessly about, driven we may suppose by the barbarous din of Radiohead. They unfruitfully end as they began (shades of the German princess describing a daughter whose marriage was unconsummated: “Ach, poor Marie-Louise, she iss as she voss!”). Strictly, I would venture, for fans of tag-wrestling. Then, as Trisha Brown’s snail’s-pace For MG: The Movie got into its non-stride, Petronio’s muscular fury seemed almost welcome. I have always thought the work of Trisha Brown (one of the gurus of New York’s post-post-modern dance) a nagging bore.

This piece, with its inertia, its nine dancers in beige leotards and stunned expressions, its hateful sound-track of discrete and tedious noise, its drearily portentous manner as the cast pose or run about or strike Anglo-Saxon attitudes, is an authentic stinker, self-obsessed, self-destructive, interminable as it turns yet again on its own axis. Enough already. About Pennies from Heaven by Ashley Page, director of the company, I report that it is one of those “send them home happy” affairs in which old popular songs (here the 1930s selection) are set dancing. Page locates the piece in a hotel, with a long bar where assorted clichés meet and part. The choreography is busy, unappealing. Some of the women in the cast wear ugly point shoes; the clothes are not what they might be, and the piece lasts at least the decade that it supposedly commemorates. The songs, every one of them, have charm. The dances do not.