In 1956 Soviet Ballet came west in a momentous season by the Bolshoi Ballet at Covent Garden. The first performance brought us Galina Ulanova in Lavrovsky's monumentalRomeo and Juliet, and won our hearts. Verismo, of course - "You can almost smell the Verona drains" - but dancing that spoke Shakespeare's words, with conviction; compelling interpretations, and an ensemble at its magnificent best. Now, 48 years on, the Bolshoi's new Romeo, produced by a British director (Declan Donnellan), choreographed by a Byelorussian (Radu Pokilitaru), is an affront to score (Prokofiev is nastily truncated), to putative source, to its company's history. If the Bolshoi is reduced to such brutishness, it has fallen on evil times.

This Romeo is crass in its updating of the action to the present day, played against dreary, minimal scenery and dressed with all the wit of an episode of Big Brother (which, in its coarseness of behaviour, the staging oddly resembles). This is yob culture, pandering to the lowest common denominator of theatrical understanding, wholly selfish in tinkering with dramatic scheme and music in quest of yet shoddier tricks. Among its sins let me note its lack of emotional resonance: Juliet has become a hoyden, much given to those flexed-foot poses, those limb-twisting agonies, that are the stock in trade of Eurotrash dance. The entire affair is resolutely choreographed off-point. Romeo is a wimp, flailing about on the stage like a landed salmon. Mercutio seems sexually ambivalent and appears at the Capulet ball in drag. The action implicit in the score (let alone in Shakespeare) is cursorily examined. There are a few admirable moments, as when Mercutio smears blood from his wounds on to Romeo's face, baptising him to vengeance, and when, as the bedroom scene ends, Romeo leaves, trailing a bed-sheet, and Juliet holds it as a last memory of her lover. The score, trimmed though it is, was given with a fine urgency by the Bolshoi's orchestra under Pavel Klinichev. The cast battled with their caricature roles. Maria Alexandrova was energetically Juliet-as- Sylvie-Guillem. Denis Savin was Romeo-as-neurotic, and tireless in the cause. I salute Yury Klevtsov as a Mercutio who rose above the fatuities of his role, and Denis Medvedev as a knife-sharp Tybalt. Ilse Liepa chewed the scenery over the body of Tybalt: 48 years ago the wonderful Elena Ilyushchenko brought off the scene with similar emotional bravura. The Verona populace indulge in mass mime and what I think may be Anglo-Saxon attitudes, with automaton skill and entire absence of point.