Giselle is one of ballet's most naive heroines; Albrecht one of its most duplicitous heroes. The opening minutes of any performance will usually tell us what kind of spin dancers are going to put on them. Will we hate the caddish count on sight? Will we want to slap Giselle out of her trusting, virginal trance? These lovers were antique back in 1841 when arch-Romantic Theophile Gaultier wrote them into the ballet canon, and 21st-century dancers can find it hard to make sympathetic sense of them.
On Wednesday night, however, Tamara Rojo and Johan Kobborg did much more than make sense of the tale. Without compromising a second of the ballet's fragile logic, they gave dramatic life to every beat of the performance. They did that special thing of losing themselves in ballet history while remaining passionately present in every gesture.
Kobborg's Albrecht is a man besotted with love - so juiced up with adoration and fantasy that he barely registers anyone other than Giselle on stage. He has wandered miles out of his aristocratic routine into a place of his own imagining, yet what stops him looking mawkish is the transparent beauty of his dancing. Kobborg's Danish training has honed in him an extraordinarily clean line and ardent jump. We believe in Albrecht because the facts of his dancing are simultaneously so honest and so seductive. That he is also a partner of musical elegance and selfless accuracy clinches his power. We are entranced by him, so of course Giselle has to be.
Rojo portrays her own character as a girl so painfully shy she can barely meet her lover's gaze. But she also plays literally and symbolically with Giselle's love of dancing - showing how eagerly she sheds her inhibitions as soon as she can move. In some performances Giselle's constant needling to show off her steps can make her seem like a spoilt child. With Rojo it carries the urgency of someone who can't express herself any other way. Again, what makes this work is the quality of Rojo's technique and her ability to make space within a single phrase for changes in emotional dynamic. When dancers reach this level they can make absolute sense of ballet's superficial limitations, charging up its simple plotlines with a subtext of visceral and musical feeling.
Rojo's second act didn't quite match her first, its ghostly transparency not quite in her range, though I loved the way she retained spectral threads of her character even beyond the grave. Wednesday's supporting cast was mixed, but the lovers were wonderfully complemented by Christopher Saunders's dark and complicated Hilarion and William Tuckett's bluff and cynical Duke.
In rep until May 16. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
