Swan Lake is the most famous ballet in the world that is easy to take for granted. Most of us know the story and can hum the music, while ballet companies perform it so often they could dance it in their sleep.

In all this familiarity there is, if not contempt, then a kind of amnesia. It's as if we've forgotten what Swan Lake is about. A swan and a prince and an evil magician you say, and you are right. But it's also about love and betrayal, and the redemptive power of forgiveness. A really good Swan Lake makes you see this anew, as well as providing a cracking night in the theatre.

English National Ballet is halfway there with its current production of the ballet. Act I, where the Prince meets his friends, and Act II, where he meets Odette, are gorgeously, believably done. The plush costumes and evocative sets sparkle into life, as does much of the dancing, which is choreographed by Derek Deane (the company's last director but one) after Marius Petipa, as well as by Frederick Ashton.

Thomas Edur plays the Prince as a wholesome nobleman. He is reluctant to marry not because he's a manic depressive or muddled about his mother, as recent re-imaginings of the ballet suggest, but because he believes in love and he doesn't love any of the princesses his mother provides. However, she does provide the crossbow with which he hunts Odette, a telling detail that this production makes clear.

Edur is a thoroughbred dancer, as is Agnes Oaks who shimmers in the dual role of Odette/Odile. Her White Swan is all sorrowful restraint, while her Black Swan is a calculated display of icy lust.

Also good is the Tutor (an affable Michael Coleman), and the Pas de Quatre in Act I. This little-seen sequence reveals how the Prince loves life, and loves dancing - but only with the right girl. Less good are an uneven, often unsynchronised corps of swans, the character dancers in Act III, who lack character, and the "sticks" held by Rothbart so his cloak looks like wings (it doesn't). There is also some murky lighting in Act III and Act IV, which means you rather lose the thread.