Romeo and Juliet, Royal Opera House, London

The Mariinsky's 1940 classic is now an old reprobate with nudges, winks and hints of perversity everywhere you look

The granddaddy of all Romeo and Juliets shuffled into London last week, still spry even if it is eccentric and inclined to wander.

There's no need for a DNA test to demonstrate the paternity of Leonid Lavrovsky's production, first created for the Mariinsky Ballet (then the Kirov) in 1940. The family resemblances between this and most subsequent classical R&Js are obvious – from the faded green and gold colour schemes for the rival clans to the interminable death of Mercutio, strumming a farewell on his sword as if it were a mandolin.

When choreographer John Cranko was asked why he ripped off large swathes of Lavrovsky's ball scene while making his own Romeo and Juliet 20 years later, he replied: "It was too good not to use." Kenneth MacMillan was less forthright about his (arguably greater) version for the Royal Ballet, but just as filial.

Over the years, though, Lavrovsky's production has become a bit of a reprobate. There are nudges and winks and hints of perversity everywhere you look. Tybalt's cross-dressing companions delight in kicking a fruit vendor in the face. The ball where Romeo and Juliet meet, with its knights hawking around cushions for their ladies to kneel on, looks like a Cinquecento swingers' party.

There's no confrontation between Paris and Romeo at Juliet's tomb, because the former has wandered off with an arm around the shoulder of his consoling young page. And Lady Capulet's relationship with her young kinsman Tybalt is straight out of Aeschylus. At the end of the third act she rides his dead body, cowboy position, tearing her hair and pressing his hand to her breast and obviously having the time of her life.

Even before he becomes the focus of this deranged piece of auntie-love, Ilya Kuznetsov's Tybalt is the most unbalanced feature of the ballet. Manic, orange-haired, wild-eyed and clothed in garish motley, he is a Renaissance Joker with Verona as his Gotham City. Making him such a Lord of Misrule leaves the supposedly quicksilver Mercutio with nowhere to go, and Alexander Sergeyev, despite being a finer dancer and having flashier steps to dance, never comes close to suggesting that he has the personality to match his nemesis.

In all this there is the suspicion that Lavrovsky found Romeo and Juliet themselves a little boring. He hardly differentiates between Juliet's feelings for Romeo and Paris at the ball, and it takes a dancer of Viktoria Tereshkina's subtlety to imply that she's breathing just a bit more freely with the man she really loves. Her long, equine face settles too easily into dazed stoicism though, and she could do worse than learn from the woman who plays her nurse, the marvellously expressive Polina Rassadina.

As for Romeo, his one outstanding characteristic is that he is not at all outstanding – the only non-exhibitionist on display, upstaged even by two incidental beggars, lurking round the fringes. By this measure alone, Evgeny Ivanchenko was born to play him.