Is there such a thing as being too perfect? Marianela Nuñez is certainly one of the most perfect ballerinas around. At 44, she still has superlative technique and absolute command. She can reel off a fiendish string of fouettés (as in tonight’s extract from Le Corsaire), whipping her leg in circles, and then come to a gentle standstill, the smoothest brakes you ever saw. It is absolutely frictionless; it is beauty and capability and egoless self-possession. And this might seem an unfair ask, but do we sometimes also need a little grit?

Timeless is Nuñez’s first solo show. Not truly solo, but she’s the star, it’s her choice of repertoire, and she does everything “just right”, paying tribute to the Royal Ballet, the company she joined at 16, and its choreographers: Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan, Christopher Wheeldon, Wayne McGregor. She also offers an amazing showcase of the company’s dancers and generously allows them to shine, so much so that Matthew Ball and Mayara Magri dancing the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet is an absolute highlight, Magri giddy as she watches her Romeo swoop manfully around the stage. Akane Takada and Calvin Richardson are tender in a duet from McGregor’s Infra, and Fumi Kaneko and Lukas B Braendsrød dance Wheeldon’s serene After the Rain – although they can’t fill the long phrases in the exquisite way Nuñez once did with Thiago Soares.

For herself, Nuñez chooses first Jerome Robbins’ In the Night, set to Chopin’s Nocturnes. It’s a very grownup piece for three couples, full of simple, breath-holding elegance. Nuñez dances with Ball, all super-smooth take-offs into jumps and lifts and tortuous indecision about their relationship status. It’s a subtle and gorgeous piece. Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand is the opposite, quite the melodrama, not least Nuñez’s TB-stricken courtesan, coughing on the chaise longue.

But Nuñez has a level of reserve and containment that makes this a dance of resistance and surrender rather than passion and fire. Her textbook classical and neo-classical pas de deux are in some ways the most arresting; as well as Corsaire, there’s Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux with the Royal’s new principal Patricio Revé, a promising partnership for the future. You could ask for more, but you can’t fault her.