Marianela Nuñez began this season's run of Bayadères dancing a transfixingly cold-hearted Gamzatti. On Monday she made her debut as doomed heroine Nikiya, negotiating a transforming U-turn into virtue. Nuñez is a strong, plush dancer and she rightly didn't risk playing Nikiya as a sanctified waif. Instead she used her powerfully arched back and plumb-centred technique to orchestrate her own passionate music inside the role.
One of Nuñez's distinctive gifts is her ability to slow her dancing down to a tantalising, rich rubato, and in the first scene, when Nikiya is confidently in love with Solor, she stretched key phrases into an arc of suspended desire before catching up the orchestra in a quick dazzle of happiness. When Nikiya discovers her betrayal, those same dynamic extremes were reworked to become a trance of misery. Even if Nuñez's interpretation lacked psychological detail, her phrasing was saturated with drama - and this served her equally well in the abstracted Shades act, when her dancing elevated her to pure visionary status.
Nuñez's nemesis on Monday was Lauren Cuthbertson, making her own debut as Gamzatti and radiating a precocious intelligence. Even when she was sitting on the sidelines, her body flaunted a pitiless sense of entitlement. When she was dancing, she was formidably certain of what she was aiming for; at 19, Cuthbertson is surely a ballerina in the making.
What a shame that Thiago Saures's Solor was so unmoved by either fabulous woman. His finely muscled body and big jump looked like compelling physical credentials for the role, but while Saures could be glitteringly high-handed with the underlings in the ballet, his energy dissipated when he had to play the lover. Saures's dancing also looked patchy - his big effects were unpredictable and his technique ragged around the edges. The Royal's women deserve better from their men than they're currently getting.
· In rep until November 13. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
