IT WOULD be hard to imagine two more contrasting productions of Swan Lake than those now on offer in London. At Sadler’s Wells, Matthew Bourne’s saucy modern staging wittily upends the world’s favourite ballet by casting the swans as strong, scary men.

Bourne’s take is amusing and affecting, and unlike anything Tchaikovsky could possibly have imagined.

At the Royal Opera House, it is the exact opposite. Tradition is the name of the game in Anthony Dowell’s 1987 version, which goes back 100 years to Petipa and Ivanov’s classic 1895 choreography. This determination to seek choreographic authenticity is admirable and Dowell’s Royal Ballet staging fully deserves its popularity, despite the fact that Yolanda Sonnabend’s fussy designs still look over-decorated. She, too, highlights the ballet’s Russian roots, evoking the tsarist court of the 1890s, its St Petersburg elegance trimmed in gold like a Fabergé egg.

Best of all are the two lakeside scenes, the so-called white acts. Here Dowell allows Swan Lake to breathe more fully its air of strange mystery and overwhelming sadness. His Act IV is fantastic, Siegfried urgently pursuing the woman he has betrayed, Odette inexorably drawn towards death, and all the while Tchaikovsky reaching into the very heart of their tragedy.

Tamara Rojo led the opening cast. She is a womanly Odette who greets Prince Siegfried with voluptuous aloofness, a creature to be desired but not touched. At first this worried me. I feared she would rely on technical expertise at the expense of feeling, but as the ballet progressed Rojo developed the drama and by Act IV she had buried my doubts in a swirl of passionate expression that carried her Odette over the edge of life itself.

Rojo is a dancer of enormous strength and proficiency, and she used her assets brilliantly in Act III’s famous seduction scene. Here, as the evil Odile, Rojo regaled Siegfried with an Olympian display of ballet technique — phenomenal balances, astonishing turns — virtually daring anyone to outdance her.

Carlos Acosta is not one of nature’s Siegfrieds. Broody introspection doesn’t sit easily on a dancer so fabulously extrovert. Yet he, too, rose to the dramatic imperative of the final act, swept along by Rojo’s conviction.

There was quality dancing elsewhere: Laura Morera and Marianela Nuñez in the Act I pas de trois, Belinda Hatley in the Neapolitan dance, and Lauren Cuthbertson and Sarah Lamb as the Two Swans. Valery Ovsyanikov conducted with gusto. What better treat on a grey winter’s day?

Box office: 020-7304 4000 To Jan 25