The difficult balancing act of Swan Lake

Swan Lake | Royal Opera House, London

The relationship of Odette and Siegfried is doomed from the start (always excepting the Soviet-derived version, with its happy ending), but some stage partnerships in these roles labour under the same fatality. The Royal Ballet is trying several partnerships during its run of Swan Lake and demonstrating just how hard it is to achieve the perfect male-female equation. It is not only that couples require physical compatibility for the doublework, so that the man can lift or support the woman comfortably and the dance shapes can slot smoothly together. But their chemistry also needs to be right, with just enough friction to spark interest: too similar and they will look flatly uniform, too different and they will clash, too unequal and one will blot out the other.

The relationship of Odette and Siegfried is doomed from the start (always excepting the Soviet-derived version, with its happy ending), but some stage partnerships in these roles labour under the same fatality. The Royal Ballet is trying several partnerships during its run of Swan Lake and demonstrating just how hard it is to achieve the perfect male-female equation. It is not only that couples require physical compatibility for the doublework, so that the man can lift or support the woman comfortably and the dance shapes can slot smoothly together. But their chemistry also needs to be right, with just enough friction to spark interest: too similar and they will look flatly uniform, too different and they will clash, too unequal and one will blot out the other.

This imbalance affected the partnership of Tamara Rojo and Johan Persson, both making their debuts in the Royal Ballet production. As to be expected from Rojo, she discarded the lazy textbook approach, opting instead to apply her own incisive intelligence to a radical rethink, so that each movement sprang out pristine and vivid with meaning. Her Odette was cast in her own personal image, forthright and passionate and perhaps too pertly definite to find the sad poetry of the choreography. But that is a quibble in an interpretation that was a marvel in its technical and dramatic articulacy, balances held stock still for endless moments, triple fouettés tossed off intrepidly, the smallest contour of her body a transparent conduit for her fluctuating emotions.

All this completely overshadowed Persson, slight in stature and light in his dancing, but dramatically colourless. She should have had Carlos Acosta as her partner; having received a mostly Russian training, he knows plenty about the classical grand manner and about smooth, powered jumps that land with pin-point clarity. Yet beneath the princely restraint beats a violently passionate heart, his gestures elegant, but intensely eloquent. Miyako Yoshida as his Odette-Odile had a lovely chaste delicacy. Her Odette was too self-contained, but the same loveliness transformed her Odile into a creature of real allure, the opposite of the brittle hag that has you wondering how Siegfried could be so deluded.

The best matched couple, Leanne Benjamin and Johan Kobborg, managed an equilibrium between drama and dance, even if neither component was outstanding. But they created beautiful moments in the Act 2 pas de deux, the lonely violin music fusing with gentle melody to produce a suspended hush that enveloped the stage and auditorium. Kobborg (another debut) has the crisp bounce and sharpness of the Danish school, his beats fluttering like insect wings and his trick steps so numerous that they threatened to overcrowd his variations.

About other roles: wicked Rothbart, whether Ashley Page or Luke Heydon, doesn't stand a chance in a costume that makes him resemble a moulting cockroach. Luke Heydon as the tutor needs to cut down on his repertoire of tipsy falls. The four cygnets always end up dancing like drum majorettes because they listen only to the music's counts and ignore its melancholy. In other companies, the same dance doesn't look like this; and in other companies, the general standards of performance are considerably higher.

To 2 Dec (020-7304 4000)