King Kojong favours a sort of matador’s hat turned on its side and topped with a gold TV aerial. Their little son’s burden of state is made heavier by a huge container of McDonald’s fries pierced with a 2ft-long chopstick. Small wonder that, when Queen Min meets two Western ladies wearing tiny confections of embroidery and ostrich plumes, she studies them keenly and says, with feeling: “I could get used to these hats.”The battalion of artists, producers and overseers (a 39-member “advisory committee”) involved may charge me with cultural condescension. But while The Last Empress takes itself very seriously, it has not seriously considered the requirements of a musical. This heavily political biography is complicated, shapeless and impersonal, the few emotional moments far outweighed by nationalism and heroine-worship.

“Your Highness,” sings a court lady, “I wish I could be like you/ you’re beautiful, a dream come true.” When the queen takes French lessons, the Western teacher, prostrating herself, exclaims, “You are possibly a genius!” There are, it’s true, Westerners who love abasing themselves to the leader of their sacred cult – Moonies, for example – but patrons of musicals like their characters with a bit more give and take.
We also expect, not just for moral but dramatic reasons, a show that is not a jingoistic pageant. The Japanese, with whom the Koreans make an ill-starred alliance, are here shown to be greedy, treacherous and cruel, finally assassinating the brave queen (who, 30 years on, doesn’t look a day older than her wedding photo). As vindictive as it is gratuitous is the showing of a film of the US bombing of Hiroshima The sponsoring Korea Foundation says it “endeavours to… create a better world through international understanding,” but I can’t see The Last Empress bringing them to their feet in Tokyo.Hee Gap Kim’s score may include chimes, cymbals and a shakuhachi, but is otherwise indistinguishable from the usual Les Mis-style soupiness and clamour. Georgina St George’s task of translating the lyrics was probably impossible; the result is certainly terrible.Tae Won Yi as the queen and Hee Jung Lee as the young king’s regent have impressive, if not terribly expressive, voices; but Seung Ryong Cho, merely pudgy and plaintive as the king, seems a Cliff Richard who’s got in over his head.

The real star of Ho Jin Yun’s production is the costume designer, Hyun Sook Kim. The rainbow-striped kimonos are what show Korea’s great talent and tradition. An exhibition of them would create appreciation and good will better than this musical shotgun wedding of East and West.To 16 Feb (0870 890 1101). Cleverly, Lindsay Kemp starts his evening of Dreamdances with the best and strongest of them, “Memories of a Traviata”. It is clever of him also to leave all the noise and energy in this to recordings of Verdi’s music, while his own interpretation hides its passion under a mask of quietness, from his fantastically slow, gliding entry to the tragic despair of the ending, when a handkerchief red with blood suddenly contrasts with his white frock and whitened features.The delicacy of his hand movements and the intensity of facial expressions carry most of the action, aided some of the time by Marco Berriel’s smiling, handsome young admirer. This piece isn’t about Dumas’s Camille, Verdi’s Violetta or Maria Callas’s singing, but about Kemp’s wishful thoughts about them and the whole desperately romantic idea that lies behind them.
A similar process occupies most of Kemp’s other portraits in the show, although these aren’t always as successful as “Memories of a Traviata”: in “Nijinsky”, for instance, sitting agitatedly on a chair doesn’t get very far into the character or the idea of madness, and climbing a stepladder is perhaps too superficial a way of saying “I want to be God”.

But his jumps in a strobe light do give an amazing illusion of youthful strength. Maybe “Salome’s Last Dance”, too, veers towards being rather slight, for all its seductiveness and severed heads.On the other hand, “Requiem for Antonio Salieri” is fun, especially when Kemp plays an imaginary keyboard with immense zest, capering about enthusiastically to match, even though it seems to show that poor old Salieri wrote the musical equivalent of doggerel, which I thought nobody believed any more.In order to give Kemp time to breathe and to change costume (also to put two immaculately convincing wigs on his bald pate), some numbers by Marco Berriel, performed by him and Nuria Moreno, fill the gaps in the programme. Perhaps it does not matter that they are far less original than Kemp’s own pieces, but it might help if they showed more of Kemp’s directness. My one memorable moment was of the somewhat pass?oreno miming to a Spanish song while Berriel sends her up by pulling faces. But they urgently need a better quality of talcum powder to blow around at the end of this number; the present one smells disgusting, even from as far back as the eighth row.There is an entirely different piece by Kemp still to come. “The Angel” is not a portrait, although it is inspired by Loie Fuller, who 100 years ago was as unusual a dancer as Kemp in our day. Wearing two enormous wings made of silk draped over a long pole held in each hand, Kemp fills the whole width of the stage with his movement, complemented by John Spradbery’s varied lighting.