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The ballet itself, long lost, retains endless fascination because of Nijinsky himself and because of how The Rite was received when first performed. The intellectual quality of Hodson and Archer’s research, based as it was on documents, photographs and the memories of Marie Rambert, who helped Nijinsky to stage The Rite, is not in question. The issue is: does it work as theatre? And, despite the impossibility of replicating the original, whether the Hodson/Archer project is intellectually honourable?

The answer is ‘yes’ on both counts. Hodson and Archer raise fascinating questions in a highly imaginative way and make audiences think. This Rite needs to be judged by slightly different criteria to a normal dance performance, as it is based on hypotheses. Although Hodson and Archer can only extrapolate from other evidence, they convey some sense of how the original must have seemed. The Rite was conceived as a total artwork: a fusion of its music, its design and its choreography. If the music and the designs (vividly restored by Kenneth Archer) are to hand, then there is a strong case for investigating the choreography.

Although Nijinsky was a very great dancer, he was not necessarily an accomplished choreographer. While his concept of The Rite was powerful, he was ‘haunted by rhythm’. Heavily influenced by Dalcrozian eurhythmics (Rambert had come to Paris to assist him from the Dalcroze Institute), his writing was very literal and strapped to the bar-line. A contemporary critic, Edwin Evans, saw “evidence of industry rather than of musical feeling.” One senses that Hodson has captured this absolutely.

As reconstructed by Hodson, The Rite comes powerfully to life, flickers and then surges again. The performance was rather reminiscent of watching a digital TV picture where the image falters - and mosaics temporarily - before reconstituting itself again. It seemed as if Millicent Hodson choreographed defensively in parts of the work, attempting to weave very slender threads together. In other sections she appeared to have a very clear view of the evidence and felt able to martial the dancers more determinedly.

The Chosen One, danced in Monday night’s Kirov cast by Yulia Makhalina, is as much a cipher as the bride of Les Noces. The choreographic line between the two was hard to miss: Bronislava Nijinska’s gestural language for the bride of Les Noces echoed that of her brother for The Rite’s Chosen One. Which is hardly surprising: Nijinsky set the original choreography for the Chosen One on his sister.

The Kirov dancers gave a convincing performance on Monday night. Last October I saw Rome Opera Ballet’s version, this time with Deborah Bull as the Chosen One. Bull’s final dance was an altogether fiercer affair. Makhalina’s reading was more tentative: a timid and unwilling victim overcome by exhaustion and eventual death.

The Rite is so much more than its choreography. Its choice of subject matter is at least as significant. It is the first anthropological representation of men and women on the ballet stage, breaking with the exoticism of such works as Schéhérazade. It is an unsentimental view of man. Although Nijinsky’s creatures are primitives, they are the automata of an industrial age. Simply to marshal these figures on the stage against Roerich’s backdrops and Stravinsky’s music – even with an approximation of the choreography - forces audiences to ask themselves the sort of questions they might do in an art gallery.

The ballet has become emblematic of the shock of the new. Its choreography was not admired in its time, and might not be today. However The Rite has come to be laden with meanings and this production is a highly honourable attempt to retrieve these meanings, even if one can only remotely approximate Nijinsky’s intentions.

The theatrical test this Rite met in spades: it chilled the soul and reminded us that in his focus on the victim and the outsider, Nijinsky refreshed the art of ballet with a reminder that life is neither necessarily symmetrical nor pretty. Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer, along with the Kirov dancers and orchestra, had a great – and deserved - triumph at the Opera House on Monday night. It was good to go into the Covent Garden night, one’s mind alive with questions.