The Royal Ballet season began on Saturday night with Swan Lake. This fragment of the True Cross has been in the company repertory since 1934, when the presence of the sublime Alicia Markova with Ninette de Valois's three-year-old troupe made it possible to show the ballet in a staging that claimed direct descent from the Mariinsky Theatre creation of 40 years before. No bad lineage.

With this example, the postwar decades saw a dreadful proliferation of presentations as the Royal Ballet, by now installed at Covent Garden, made the world aware of Swan Lake's glories. And then the Bolshoi and the Kirov brought their versions to the west, and the plague of copies spread. Swan Lake was given by every troupe that could lay hands on white tutus and hapless young women prepared to learn the double role of Odette/Odile. (Look at touring schedules of various "Russian" ensembles that scurry round the regions from northern pillar to southern post: Swan Lake as rash.)

So to the Royal Ballet's version as we see it today after many revisions. Its dances, the drama's shape, are honourable and clearly owe to the St Petersburg original. Its trick of updating the narrative to the 1890s when Swan Lake was new, is fatally unwise. The court scenes are peopled with fatuities: drunks, retainers dropping things, hyperactive peasantry, smirking supernumeraries, flummery, inane dressing-up and even, for heaven's sake, arquebuses. The production, glittering in Yolanda Sonnabend's opulent design, is a mistake. Away with it! Back to the calmer, poetic and credible version we knew 30 years ago. (It is to be viewed in the recording made with Natalya Makarova and Anthony Dowell in the leading roles.) On Saturday night Marianela Nuñez (pictured) gave a beautifully exact account of the role, albeit rather reserved in emotion, and Thiago Soares was an ever-credible Siegfried. Ravishing was the dancing of Yuhui Choe in the first act pas de trois, phrased and set out with sweetest grace. The lovely Elizabeth McGorian was a serene figure amid the brouhaha as the Princess Mother; the unfailingly fine Gary Avis made everything of the Chamberlain. Boris Gruzin led a performance of the score that spoke thrilling truths about Tchaikovsky's score: to him and to the orchestra gratitude.