Swan Lake, Royal Opera House, London<br></br>Audiology, The Place, London

Like most people whose brush with autograph-hunting began and ended with an unfilled album in their teens, I have never really seen the point. Queuing on a cold pavement for the sake of a squiffy line of Biro is for hardcore theatre-anoraks only. Monday's Royal Ballet opening of Swan Lake, however, revealed another side to the story. The occasion was more than just another outing for Anthony Dowell's 1987 production. It was the first Swan Lake at Covent Garden for Alina Cojocaru, the 21-year-old Romanian wonder. Not only had my neighbour in the stalls attended every one of Cojocaru's performances since becoming the company's youngest principal two years ago, but she had signatures on dated cast sheets to prove it. "Just think what Fonteyn's first Swan would be worth now," she mused. Call autograph-hunting a hobby? It's investing in ballet futures.

But did the event live up to its potential significance? In parts. Swan Queens, new or experienced, tend to fall into two camps: those whose qualities show best in the tender melancholy of Acts II and IV, as the White Swan, Odette, and those who identify more with her vampy impersonator, Odile, in Act III. To judge by Cojocaru's best work of the past six months (her minxy Olga in Onegin, her almost indecently sexed-up Mary Vetsera in Mayerling), you'd think her Black Swan would come out crowing. Instead it proved underwhelming.

In considering how to pitch her seductress, Cojocaru had clearly rejected the narrow-eyed sneers that over-egg some interpretations. Being an actress of subtlety, she restricts herself to one mocking laugh and a single gloating tilt of the throat.

Beyond that, she lets Petipa's choreography do the talking. Odile's pas de deux is virtuoso dance at its most extreme, and Cojocaru surmounts its technical challenges with an ease that almost amounts to indifference: the famous 32 fouettés, the endless travelling spins, that triumphant unsupported balance on point, which most ballerinas fudge with a flighty upward lurch, but which Cojocaru holds for an eternity. She can certainly turn all the tricks. But there was an electricity lacking on Monday that undermined the whole dizzy crescendo of the plot and left its tragic climax (when Siegfried realises he has been duped by a lookalike) a real damp squib.

Yet that same aloofness worked wonders for the ballerina as Odette, whose sweetly vibrating foot at the close of the Act II pas de deux seemed to embody all that was discreet and proud and royal about her character, rather than weepy and fragile and desperate. As always, when Cojocaru takes on a role, she makes it entirely her own. You could hardly say she found a special rapport with her Prince, the excellent Johan Kobborg, since she barely ever looked him in the face. Yet the pair share a special quality of being able to suggest shades of thought or emotion so fleetingly that you half-doubt what you saw. The flicker of lingering fear and doubt as Odette yields to Siegfried's love, for instance. Or the passing wonder in his eyes when he first touches her and finds flesh, not feathers. This is ballet theatre at its most subtle, and a reading that can only grow bigger and better with time.

What to make of the Pacitti Company's latest show, Audiology, "a performance about hearing, truth and belief which explores the lives of Joan of Arc and Howard Hughes because she heard voices and he was paranoid about being overheard"?

Featuring five live performers, film, a shag pile rug and a 12" LED box, it presents an unsettling amalgam of sound and visuals which left me both excited and wary. Excited by its off-the-wall originality (it's neither drama, nor visual theatre, nor installation art, more 21st-century psycho-cabaret), I was at the same time suspicious of its content.

Was the nudity a coded reference to the fact that the reclusive aircraft engineer also designed Jayne Mansfield's bra? Is the juxtaposing of Hughes and Joan of Arc any more than an elaborate joke? Aware that this is the kind of show that could leave the too-earnest reviewer looking a complete ninny, I have curbed my natural instincts to sniff out a grand plan. Instead, I merely note my favourite images: the TV "cartographer" who proceeds to whip off her top to rub a live microphone over the contours of her naked torso; the guy who starts dancing to Elvis's "Jailhouse Rock" but hits a snag when the record sticks (but what matter when you play the whole song complete in your head?).

"Audiology" is indeed a fascinating dissertation on hearing and seeing, and not-hearing, not-seeing. I remain unenlightened about poor Joan of Arc.

j.gilbert@independent.co.uk

'Swan Lake': ROH, London WC2 (020 340 4000), in rep to 17 Dec. 'Audiology' tours in March 2003