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Onegin has been in the RDB's repertoire since 1989. It's been a big success right from the start: the strong story line and the scale of the piece - not too grand - suit these dancers and this theatre perfectly, and on this occasion (the first time I've seen it here) it was done with such conviction and confidence that every element of it rang true. Yes, even the doddery ancients in the party scene: the Danes send out a team of their senior character dancers - grown-ups who know how to act - so that even though there's an unavoidable element of caricature in what Cranko has set for them, for the first time that I can remember I watched their antics with pleasure rather than with toes curled in embarrassment. Graham Bond shaped the score to produce some dramatic highlights which I don't remember from the time he conducted it at Covent Garden.

I liked Gudrun Bojesen's sensitive, intelligent Tatiana very much. She's not a dancer who wears her heart on her sleeve, and her shyness and reserve make Onegin's treatment of her seem all the more gratuitously unkind. In the dream scene she holds back from complete abandon (partly perhaps because she hasn't danced with Greve often enough to have built up an instinctive relationship with him) but she develops her character with admirable consistency, through her humiliation at her party and her newly adult reactions in the duel scene to the composed demeanour of the married woman in the ballroom. Although she may not have access to the uninhibited passion which the greatest Tatianas unleash in the last scene, both her dancing and the character she creates have an integrity which allow her to make her effect in her own, quieter way.

Femke Mølbach Slot was just right as Olga - a fundamentally good-natured girl, but self-centred and spoilt, she's too inexperienced to read Onegin's behaviour and only wakes up to the real depth of her feelings when it's too late. Her Lensky was Marcin Kupinski, a corps de ballet dancer getting one of his first big roles. He looks even younger than he actually is, and although he's evidently been very carefully coached he still comes across as someone reproducing, rather well, exactly what he's been taught rather than someone who's creating a character from within himself. It shows up most in his famous solo before the duel, where we learn of his grief and despair from his acting rather than from the expressiveness of his dancing. Byron Mildwater made Gremin a slightly less sympathetic character than usual: pleasant enough, but without the warmth that sometimes make one think Tatiana will find real happiness with him eventually.

Greve has been dancing Onegin long enough to have found a cogent, convincing reading of the role which suits his own physique and style. There's nothing cold or standoffish about him at his first entrance: on the contrary he's amiable, even charming. It's only when he's alone with Tatiana that we discover his overweening self-regard, betrayed by his callously patronising reactions to what she's reading and how she behaves. There's more of that in the party scene - I think it's the careless cruelty of that 'there's a good girl' pat on the shoulder that finally makes her see how she's mistaken him - and it's the same lack of empathy that makes him push Lensky too far. What I like about Greve's performance is that he's visibly still the same person in the last act. Tragedy may have softened and subdued him but it hasn't broken him; he still has enough pride to demand her love rather than begging her for it.

Greve dedicated this last performance to his wife, Marie-Pierre, and to the memory of Rudolf Nureyev. His great mentor's influence is still clearly to be seen, especially in his acting, and it was touching that he should want to acknowledge his debt in the closing moments of his dancing career. His wife was also a principal dancer with the company and is leaving with him for Finland: she's been injured, and didn't get a farewell show of her own, but he brought her on from the wings to share in his applause. He's obviously meant a lot to the Danish audience, who (the Queen and many of his colleagues included) gave him a minutes-long standing ovation as gold squares rained down around him.