A packed and unusually buzzing house on Wednesday evening reminded one just how popular Onegin is. Which, in theory, might come as a surprise. After all, its creator, John Cranko, was not in the same ...

But Manon has all those showy pas de deux, I hear you cry – can Onegin match those? It has its pas de deux but they compare in neither number nor showiness, I'll admit – and that's the point. Manon ...

Cranko took the predictable love melodrama - I want you, I don't, actually I do, well now I don’t - and turned it into a full-length, three act ballet. It divides people - some love it, some less so.

The two have many similarities, from their basis in novels that became operas (though Prévost's Manon Lescaut antedates Pushkin's verse Eugene Onegin by a century), through their patched-together ...