Nick [Ormerod] and I were in the director's box, which is about two feet from the stage, and two of them caught my eye and winked at us as they jumped I thought I'd died and gone to heaven I thought, I can't believe I know these people. Donnellan is already getting offers from other dance companies to make more ballets. A new full-length narrative work for the Bolshoi has been mooted, as has one for the exacting Paris Opera Ballet who, says Donnellan, "have asked me to find some music that I'd like to make a story to".His enthusiasm for the project is both infectious and rather sweet "I'm not really a fan of the theatre," he says. "There wasn't even a letter from 'Disgusted of Minsk'," he says.

"I think maybe one person walked out, but for all I know they needed a pee. And the cast loved performing it." However, the British opera critic, Rupert Christiansen, who was at the first night, took a different view. Having dismissed the choreography as "inept", he wrote: "The first-night audience was plainly baffled." But he did concede that "the young might well adore it".Since then it has played to packed houses, and after London the production is off to the USA and France. And perhaps inevitably there are echoes of Jerome Robbins in the crowd and combat scenes.When the production opened in Moscow last December, it was, Donnellan says, "received incredibly well. Totally without controversy." Despite the Bolshoi's conservative ethos - "They're tarting the theatre up now to bring it into the 19th century, never mind the 21st" - no one cared that there were no pointe shoes; that it was in modern dress (modish jewel-coloured prom dresses); that Juliet marries in a trouser suit; and that Mercutio wears a frock. On day one in the studio with the two first-cast dancers, Denis Savin and Maria Aleksandrova, "I went to demonstrate a step which involved rolling on the floor and suddenly realised I couldn't stand up; they had to help me to my feet." He decided he needed help.The choreographer he found was Radu Poklitaru, a young Minsk-based Moldovan whose chief influences, at least from the promo clips I've seen, would seem to be Mats Ek, at least in terms of its exaggerated, contorted, sometimes grotesque steps and lifts, not to mention the dancers' shrieks, screams and cackles.

For a start, though Donnellan has fluent French - still to some extent the language of ballet - he has only "terrible schoolboy Russian", so he and the company were communicating through interpreters. In the play, he continues, "everything is pulling them apart - that seemed to be the choreographic essence of the thing." Though the book was written long before the idea of making a ballet became a reality, it is peppered with references to movement, to acting through one's body, to being "moulded by [one's] space".But theorising is one thing, choreographing another And in the rehearsal studio, things got trickier. In some ways a variation on Stanislavsky's An Actor Prepares, it is a treatise for actors on overcoming blocks. It features an imaginary actress, Irina, as she prepares for the balcony scene, which Donnellan believes represents "our enduring image of romantic love, for there is no love without separation". But when it's good, it's transcendent."The genesis of the Bolshoi project dates back to last summer when the company's general director at the time, Anatoly Iksanov, having been impressed by the Falstaff Donnellan had directed at the Salzburg Festival, asked him to direct an opera. "Though I love doing opera, I said what I'd really like to do is a ballet of Romeo and Juliet.

Only Russians would be mad enough to say: 'Yes, of course you can.'" With his partner, Cheek by Jowl's co-artistic director and the designer of all but one of its 25 productions, Nick Ormerod ("who does not like ballet at all"), he produced a scenario. This reduced Shakespeare's play, which Donnellan last directed nearly 20 years ago in Regent's Park (starring a fresh-out-of-Rada Ralph Fiennes), to a succession of scenes that could be communicated through movement.It is, however, a play he's considered deeply over the years and written a book about, The Actor and the Target - published, incidentally, in Russian before it appeared in English. It's not an intellectual thing; I don't know anything about ballet. It's impossible to say why, because dance is something I've never had explained to me Yet the first time I saw it I felt I understood it.