At first sight, Lauren Cuthbertson is not an obvious Juliet. She is tall, and her dancing has a very English proportion and restraint. She is the type of performer that Frederick Ashton valued highly (her Summer Fairy was one of the few truly Ashtonian elements in the recent Cinderella run), but which, by 1980, Kenneth MacMillan's expressionistic, Teutonically inflected choreographic style had rendered all but extinct.
Strange, then, to see her making her debut in MacMillan's most popular ballet. Cuthbertson's Juliet is very much the hot-housed child, brought to nubile fruition in gilded isolation. Uncertain in public, and a little awkward in her reactions, she quickly learns to mimic the stately manners of her caste. Edward Watson's glamorously dangerous Romeo, however, catches her by surprise, and she tumbles into his arms without a flutter of resistance or a thought for the consequences.
This Juliet is no teenage rebel; she has, clearly, always been a biddable child and we never sense an overt resistance to Capulet authority. But she believes unquestioningly in love, and the ballroom and balcony scenes see her open-mouthed with the thrill of it all. The impression in these duets is less of MacMillan-style hyper-physicality than of simple, classical grace.
Cuthbertson's phrasing is instinctive, and her upper-body articulation quietly beautiful. In act three, as chaos and darkness close around her, her dancing takes on a dying-mayfly quality - pale, incomprehending, barely resisting.
Watson also makes his debut, and his Romeo is a tense and conflicted figure. His pursuit of Rosaline falls just short of the aggressive, and when he first sees Juliet at the Capulet's ball he fixes on her like a bird of prey.
His gaze is raptorial - to begin with at least, she's just another well-born pigeon for the plucking. Marriage, we sense, only partly redeems this self-serving streetfighter, and his ecstatic moonings at the beginning of act two are no more plausible to us than they are to Mercutio and Benvolio.
Watson is a supremely elegant dancer in solo and supporting roles, but here he clearly felt the pressure of the occasion, and his partnering had moments of uncertainty. This was never quite a man in love. The tentative emotional core of his performance was bolstered by the strong ensemble playing around him, however, with Thiego Soares a peppery Tybalt and José Martin a likeably raffish Mercutio.
The swordplay looked sharper than it has for some time, and Vanessa Palmer's whore was, as always, excellent value for money.
· In rep until April 16. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
