On Tuesday, the Hastingses faced a dilemma. Stricken with a short, sharp burst of summer flu, we had tickets for the ballet. It seemed mean to inflict our germs on others. We tried to find substitutes. Having failed, however, we could not face throwing away ?190. We staggered along to Covent Garden.

Very quickly, we wished that we had not. We have seen Romeo and Juliet four times in the past three years, done by the Royal Ballet and the Kirov, and always adored it. This time, however, the Bolshoi company had enlisted the services of two famous innovators, Declan Donnellan and Nicholas Ormerod, to produce a new version choreographed by Radu Poklitaru.

It was catastrophic. After a few minutes of watching the modern-dress bodies writhing and shaking on stage, we began to wonder where we had seen them before. Like almost everybody else in the house, we thought of Jerome Robbins and West Side Story half a century ago. Robbins did it vastly better.

One began to regard the dancers with the sort of pity onlookers must have felt at the Charge of the Light Brigade, though this affair was certainly not magnificent. We bailed out at the interval, and apparently missed booing at the end. Reviews yesterday were scathing.

Luke Jennings wrote in the Guardian: "That the production ever saw the light of day suggests a troubling lack of discrimination ... A lack of directorial and choreographic inventiveness ... allowed the piece to sink like a stone". Clement Crisp in the FT described the evening as "a shameful event". Other notices were in similar vein. On Wednesday morning, therefore, as pretty ignorant ballet enthusiasts, we were relieved to find that the experts shared our own savage view.

Now, we all cherish the concept of an artistic right to fail. But it sometimes seems astonishing how, in the development of a piece which costs a vast amount of money to stage, nobody at any point takes a look from the empty stalls and cries out: "Hang on, this is a disaster!"

It is justly remarked that opera and ballet are elitist art forms, not least because their audiences are required to pay fantastic sums of money - if judged against average earnings - to attend them. A serious moment of truth in my own life came when I stopped editing newspapers, and had to start paying for my own tickets. Because we love ballet and opera, we keep going pretty frequently.

But gosh, it can be hard when a producer and director throw in the audience's faces not only a turkey, but a production that anyone in his senses could have seen a mile off, before the first night, was going to flap and crash like that bird. More often than not, prize turkeys involve misbegotten attempts to put old wine into new, or rather modern-dress, bottles.

For most of us, a successful evening at the opera or ballet must offer visual as well as aural beauty. Yet some directors seem to take sadistic pride in offering audiences ugliness. There was a memorably grim Lucia di Lammermoor at Covent Garden a few months ago. On a lovely summer's evening a month or two ago at the Grange in Hampshire, the only discordant note was struck by events on stage at a modern-dress production of Rossini's Cenerentola. The only aspect more hideous than the costumes were the sets.

The critics agreed with the audience that the production was breathtakingly awful. I made a note of the director's name - Nigel Lowery. We shall go into exile rather than ever again see anything for which he is responsible. Even Glyndebourne, for all its wonders, is not exempt from the roll-call of predictable disasters. Four years ago the opera festival staged a Don Giovanni which made a host of loyal supporters cover their eyes in disbelief, even though the singing was great.

At this stage, sceptics may be tempted to mock: since when has Max Hastings been a credible arbiter of artistic standards at the ROH, Glyndebourne or anywhere else? Yet my point is that I am not seeking to pass judgment as a pundit, but rather to raise a protest on behalf of rank-and-file paying customers, who are hard to find at the prices opera houses charge. They must be driven to stay at home and watch telly by a couple of evenings as insulting as, well, this week's Romeo and Juliet.

One of the leading lights of a great opera house with whom I discussed this issue a few months ago said: "You've no idea how difficult it is to stop a production, once a principled decision has been made to stage it."

This is obviously true. Yet there are some evenings which promise disaster so assuredly, that it seems no more sensible to plunge ahead with them than to send into service a commercial aeroplane which persistently stalls during test flights.

Thanks to last Tuesday, it will be years before we trust ourselves to an evening with the Bolshoi again, and I doubt if we are alone among the punters who were at the Royal Opera House. I heard a man in the seat in front of us get up at the interval and say defiantly to his wife: "I'm really enjoying it." I assume that at home, he devotes himself to flagellation.