Onegin

Pushkin once said that he would give all of French literature for one work by the choreographer Didelot. It is hard to know if he would have said the same of John Cranko.

Cranko's Onegin has become a classic by stealth here. Long ignored by the Royal Ballet, it has crept into the repertoire almost while we were looking the other way. It is resolutely old-fashioned: plush, velvety sofas cover the stage, cobweb-like lace hovers overhead.

And on stage is either a tired old warhorse of honour betrayed, or an emotionally compelling drama of the birth of the anti-hero, depending on who is dancing.

When it's Adam Cooper, returned to the Royal for an all-too-short fortnight, the result is a multi-layered portrait of a shallow sophisticate, who suddenly finds that Tatiana, the dull, silly provincial girl he spurned years earlier, has metamorphosed into a woman of substance. Cooper's is not an off-the-peg cad, but a man at the tail-end of the age of Romantic heroes (Byron died three years before Pushkin's verse-novel appeared), where society no longer lives by the moral code, but is without the moral resources to live outside it either.

Onegin is mirrored by his friend Lensky (Ivan Putrov), engaged to Tatiana's sister, whom on a whim he insults and then kills in a duel. They are mirrored in more ways than intended by Cranko. Cooper is an actor-dancer of the highest order: everything with him begins with the emotion he wants to convey, which is then translated into movement. Putrov, an elegant dancer, begins by making a beautiful gesture, which he then attempts to overlay with meaning.

That he fails is no shame at the moment in the Royal Ballet: there remain no actor-dancers of any stature. Mara Galeazzi, too, is unable to show how Tatiana matures over the course of the evening.

Without this dramatic fusion at its heart, much of the choreography shows its age. It is, however, a ballet worth persevering with, if for no other reason than to remind ourselves that the Royal Ballet once produced the world's foremost dramatic dancers.

? Until 20 July. Box office: 020 7304 4000.