Manon, Royal Opera House, London

Manon, how I wish - as your lover, Des Grieux, should, if he had any sense - I had never clapped eyes on you. How I wish your story had never been written (by that crashing bore Abbé Prévost) or composed (by too many opera composers) or choreographed (by Kenneth MacMillan). But there we are: a whole Manon industry, for the evident delectation of everybody except me.

Very occasionally, though, a cast arrives on stage that grips this grump's attention until the final curtain. Carlos Acosta and Tamara Rojo, who made their debuts in the ballet this month, are one such cast. We know that Acosta and Rojo have the same approach, that, for all their virtuosity, they believe that steps must have meaning. The extent to which they fulfil their dramatic credo makes the story suddenly light up and throb with real life. Never before has it been so apparent that every pas de deux has an emotional development, so that each is a mini-narrative in itself. Acosta is a fabulous partner who transforms even the lifts into expressive statements. The long, sustained contours of his adagio solos, originally designed on Anthony Dowell's physical qualities, find perfect execution in his spacious, smooth strength. His pleading, despairing solo in the brothel scene, when Manon rejects him, has such poignancy, it is almost unbearable.

Rojo's movement has a fullness and directness that transforms the simplest gesture into a channel for the heart's deep tremors. Her Manon's special allure is visible right at the start, in the sweet, unaffected kisses with which she greets strangers. Her warmth and insouciance radiate in her encounters with Des Grieux. But confront her with material wealth, and she becomes a manipulative minx, self-consciously exercising her charms, slipping into a rich, fur-lined robe with hushed delight, turning her extended wrist to watch her diamond bracelet catch the candlelight.

Jose Martin's Lescaut has a beautiful, clean dancing-style; William Tuckett's Monsieur GM is effectively nasty, with even sexual sadism thrown in, as he drunkenly clutches Manon's neck too brutally. The harlots keep on harloting; the clients carry on leering. Their comedy - like Lescaut's drunken partnering - is just too broad, clashing with the ballet's emotional verisimilitude.

Meanwhile, sitting in dress circle row A, we can smell the fish and duck cooking in the Royal Opera House kitchens. While we're with the brothel goings-on, we could at a pinch pretend that it is a wonderful new technological trick to enhance the theatrical illusion. After all, the brothel madam may be planning hot food as well as drink. But not in the bedroom scenes.

To 2 June (020-7304 4000). Big-screen broadcast on 26 May in London, Liverpool and Sheffield