Margot Fonteyn admitted that she identified her various dancing partners over the years, with specific roles and her interpretation of them. With Nureyev she asssociated ..a new-found 'Giselle', 'Marguerite and Armand' and 'Romeo and Juliet'...These partnerships held a special significance for me, like love affairs, and I was inflexible in my fidelity.. Fonteyn and Nureyev have for so long been regarded as the quientessential stage lovers it is surprizing to think that Kenneth MacMillan's revised version of Romeo and Juliet had originally been made with other dancers in mind. Fonteyn and Nureyev however, made the roles very much their own. As Alexander Bland observed, in hindsight, after many couples alternated in the parts, ...that Fonteyn and Nureyev had given strong personal twists to the roles. In their version Juliet is a tender, immature girl who is driven against her will by her own instincts...and Romeo - a somewhat passive and simple-minded character in most versions - was given by Nureyev a mocking, mercurial gaity which dramatically contrasted with the tragic intensity of his last scenes...

The première created a phenomenal audience response that even exceeded that seen three years earlier at the debut of the Fonteyn-Nureyev partnership. They had forty-three curtain calls and forty minutes of applause, held to be a theatrical record by the Evening Standard. This production, with Fonteyn and Nureyev, was a major contributory factor to the success of The Royal Ballet's subsequent tour of the United States. It was also the work with which Fonteyn and Nureyev made their last full performance together on the stage of the Royal Opera House on January 10th, 1976.