Four months ago Sylvie Guillem took the leading role in Frederick Ashton's Marguerite and Armand, a role which no dancer had performed since it was created for Margot Fonteyn. Everyone speculated (rightly) that Guillem would be a natural Marguerite, given the similarities between that character and the heroine of Kenneth MacMillan's Manon, a role she has danced for years. But just as interesting is the degree to which Guillem's mesmerising interpretation of Marguerite has enriched her current portrayal of Manon - certainly as seen on Monday night.
Much remains familiar in her performance - the erotic virtuosity of her love duets with Des Grieux, in which her body refines itself into a pure energy of desire; the brittle chic she assumes when she becomes the trophy mistress of the wealthy Monsieur GM. Yet there's a new subtlety and nakedness in her performance which add layers to her characterisation of the MacMillan ballet.
When Guillem makes her first entrance as Manon, a girl newly exposed to fashionable Paris, she seems years younger than she used to. Rather than sizing up the glamour of this world, and calculating its rules, she seems set apart by her naive enthusiasm. Her gaze is wide-eyed, and that open-heartedness continues into the first giddy passion of her affair with Des Grieux (Jonathan Cope). There's a bright breathlessness and new spontaneity in their opening encounter and in the bedroom scene. Though Guillem and Cope have danced this ballet together dozens of times their characters look as if they've only just met, so intently and joyously do they goad each other to find new details within the choreography.
In the pas de trois with GM and her brother Lescaut, the fluctuating tensions in Guillem's body are a vivid graph of the struggle between her revulsion at GM's advances and her dawning appreciation of her own power. Her final capitulation has the stab of a small tragedy, and once she has become GM's mistress the drugged glitter of her dancing bears witness to the degradations she has accommodated.
Cope is a wonderful foil to Guillem, pushing his technique to the limits in response to her power and hunger. Irek Mukhamedov also makes a magnificently brutish Lescaut - the sheer physical weight of him, the slurry extravagance of his personality create a figure of fate both trashy and sinister. Given that Mukhamedov is 40, Cope 37 and Guillem is 35, the performance couldn't make a better case for the supremacy of the older dancer.
In rep till July 25. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
