Enchanting Hérold's 'La fille mal gardée' - enjoyed by ROBERT ANDERSON '... Covent Garden at its best.'

Ballet is joyously unregenerate. As far as I know, there is no scholarly outcry against John Lanchbery for failing to strip from Hérold all the accretions generously lent by Rossini, Donizetti, Pleyel and the rest during this ballet's progress through the nineteenth century. Still less are there any agonised laments that Lise no longer follows the steps danced by Mme Théodore at Bordeaux in 1789. That was the fatal year Jean Dauberval first produced his ballet, when Hérold had not yet been born and the heads of French monarchs still rested comparatively securely on their necks.

Some day, perhaps, we may have to endure the original music. Meanwhile we can relish this production of 1960, a year that properly concludes the previous decade rather than launches its shabby successor. Osbert Lancaster may have imagined they were toy vaches rather than cows grazing in the sloping field beyond the farmyard. His designs attempt rural France; but Frederick Ashton's village wooing is deliciously English. I could not be precise about the breed of the cock and hens which launch the ballet, but their performance suggests the best of strains.

The irruption of the Royal Ballet villagers gives the transvestite harridan of William Tuckett as Simone her curmudgeonly head, and just allows the young lovers of Carlos Acosta as Colas and Marianela Nuñez's Lise to play a brief game of hide and seek.

Dauberval died before Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, but Hérold (or maybe Rossini) undoubtedly knew it. So the storm that ends Act 1 is remarkably effective and visually quite a relief in broiling Cairo.

This 2005 production shows Covent Garden at its best. Individual performances on stage are enchanting, and I found myself inspired to adopt a couple of Carlos Acosta's more static poses before settling to review the bewitching skill of the principal dancers. It may well be that, while our political masters edge the country steadily towards insignificance, our artists will demonstrate that the land without music turned out to be the most musical of them all. The Royal Ballet, with the Royal Opera House orchestra under Anthony Twiner, make a powerful case.