There’s a scene in Mozart’s most metaphysical opera which Ingmar Bergman, creator of what is still the richest of all Magic Flutes, describes as “at the outermost limit of life”. Hero Tamino seems to have reached a point of no return and no going forward. “When will this darkness end?”, he asks, and voices reply, “Soon, soon or never”.

When the going gets tough, wheel out a crowd-pleaser. Even by its own volatile standards English National Opera has had a poor start to its autumn season, with productions of Fidelio and Die Fledermaus that seem destined to join the company’s ever-growing chamber of unrevivable horrors. ENO’s cash-strapped board must therefore be lighting another candle to the late Anthony Minghella, whose glacially delicate Madam Butterfly is always good for an outing.

Rich, racy, randy and irreverent: such were the R words gathered up by a Canadian critic to capture the essence of Christopher Alden’s production of Johann Strauss’s cork-popping operetta when it premiered in Toronto last year. Other R words, alas, came to my mind, like rubbish, reprehensible, risible, even rigor mortis.

For their first visit to the UK, Shanghai Ballet have brought a narrative ballet based on a Chinese theatrical version of Jane Eyre. It focuses on Bertha Mason, Mr Rochester’s mad wife in the attic, whose fate has often troubled readers, though the Shanghai narrative does not ask about the economic and social conditions of exploitation, the colonialism and sexism that have trapped her.

The mighty adorable Carlos Acosta is at the London Coliseum this week in all his might and all his adorableness - four times, you may like to know, he appears without his shirt on. This is relevant, because it’s not the preening bare-chestedness of a showbiz egomaniac like some I could name, it demonstrates the desire of a man to shed trappings, to be himself at his most unadorned, adorning the art he loves: classical ballet.

A magical folktale, a male duet, a classical jewel-box - programmes like this should be a rich part of the warp and weft of a ballet company, a night of rich interest and variety, stimulating dancers with challenges to their grace and storytelling skills. That it comes as the briefest glimpse in English National Ballet’s year is truly a pity, especially as it pays tribute to that superlative catalyst in ballet, Rudolf Nureyev.

When a person is happy in his work, he does his best. So best ignore what Sergei Polunin says on the page of a newspaper and look at what he does on stage. Now there’s a happy boy. Polunin is the one reason to see the Stanislavsky Ballet at the Coliseum on this short visit, though it's always a pleasure to hear Delibes’s divine score to which Roland Petit created a short, pert, thin and very French version of Coppélia, chockful with kisses.

In a summer awash with Russian ballet, at its best extravagant, limpid, spectacular - an experience of emotions processed through the eyes - a visit by an American company comes from a quite different sensory position: dance as intelligent motion, rhythmically schooled athleticism. While the American ballet was generated by a grandly classical Russian, George Balanchine, one of the things your eyes constantly search for in watching a US company is the way the Russian ballet genes, nurtured in Tsarist palaces, mutated when they met the bold, open-air, workaday grace over the Atlantic.

Austere, beautiful, heartbreaking, streaked with genius - that goes for both Benjamin Britten’s last opera Death in Venice and Deborah Warner’s remarkable production of it for ENO, returning all too briefly to the Coliseum, with a superb central performance. Besiege the box office for one of the four remaining performances if you want to see contemporary operatic art refined to its most personal and powerful.

Is it death that makes us go back to the ballet? The one artform where it is so glorified, so exquisitely reimagined as an experience of regret, hope, ecstasy or bleakest resignation that we will go to drink it in again and again, to preview our own? Maybe that’s it. Opera is about living in the threat of death (all those tubercular arias and declarations from the heart of bonfires). Theatre is all about living, imperfectly.