After 14 years with Scottish Ballet, Claire Robertson has few boxes left to tick. She joined the company straight out of college on a three-month contract, survived the regime change that saw a reversal in the company's failing fortunes, and is now one of its three principal dancers. She has worn rags in Cinderella and feathers in Swan Lake. Now she gets to fulfil one of her last remaining ambitions: to become the passion-driven heroine in Romeo and Juliet.

“The role is one I've always wanted to play,” she says, buzzing after a morning in the studio. “It's an amazing love story that everyone knows. I never get fed up of hearing the music and it takes you on a whole journey. It starts with love at first sight and in the end I kill myself. It's a life journey every night.”

The Prokofiev score and the ending are familiar, but everything else about this production is new. Krzysztof Pastor, the resident choreographer with the Dutch National Ballet, has reworked this most familiar story and remade the piece specifically for Scottish Ballet's dancers.

It is the Polish-born Pastor's first Romeo and Juliet and he has made some bold decisions with the setting and characters.

“I think you can do Romeo and Juliet many different ways,” he says in enviably good but heavily accented English. “Like the RSC does. It is such a universal story, it doesn't need to be set in the Renaissance. And you don't need swords.

“It is the touching story of two lovers, but it also has a social and political context. It is a feud between two families. Because they want to arrange Juliet's marriage, we can assume that her mother's marriage was also arranged. It is important that we look for associations with our time. And there are still cases of marriages being arranged now.”

As well as replacing the stagey sword fights with hand-to-hand combat and cutting some of the lengthy crowd scenes, Pastor has taken his red pen to the role of Juliet's nurse. “In Shakespeare, she serves as comical relief. I thought, do we need this comical relief? And I decided no, it works against us. When you have tragedy like this, why dilute it? It is such a strong story. I have made a few alterations, just to emphasise the important elements.”

The two lovers from feuding families could be from any ruptured society, divided by class, race, history, ethnicity or just a great big wall. To make this point, across the three acts of the ballet the characters stay the same age, but the setting fast-forwards from the 1930s, through the 1950s, to the present day.

The low-key costumes mirror the moving decades and there is also some video footage to add to the effect. “It is very minimal, not aggressive,” says Pastor. “It is just at specially chosen moments.”

Against this intriguing backdrop, Pastor is asking the dancers for a very natural, emotion-filled performance. Like Scottish Ballet's artistic director, Ashley Page, Pastor combines classical and contemporary techniques in fresh ways. But although the dancers are used to Page demanding - and getting - the impossible, Pastor's vision requires something else again.

“I want them to get rid of their ballet habits,” he says. “It's not a fairy tale - I want them to act like real people, without melodrama. I have to believe in them.”

For Robertson, one of three Juliets preparing for the company's Scottish tour, this process has been helped by the fact that she is dancing with a new partner.

Pastor, who made a shorter piece, In Light and Shadow, for Scottish Ballet's Edinburgh Festival show in 2006, was given a free hand to cast Romeo and Juliet. While Page might have relied on tried and tested partnerships that have been shown to work, Pastor fearlessly mixed it up. This means that Robertson's Romeo is Adam Blyde, while her usual partner, Erik Cavallari, is dancing with Sophie Martin.

Becoming acquainted with a new partner echoed her character's journey. “With Adam, I'm getting to know him a bit. Juliet is a bit naive and tentative when they first meet. She's a bit shy. They fall madly in love, but they also have to get to know each other.”

Blyde, who was spectacular as the Bluebird in the company's Christmas production of The Sleeping Beauty, is dark, handsome and a perfect foil for the blonde Robertson. She giggles. “I am very glad he's my Romeo.”

Page feels that youth can be over-rated in a dancer and several of his company, including Robertson, are over 30. She is not intimidated by the need to convince as a teenager: “Part of the job is to act, to take yourself back to how you felt when you first fell in love many years ago. It's all about the look. Is he looking at me, catching his eye across a room? I have to try to live the role as much as I can and make people believe that we're in love and that I have killed myself.”

Her costumes are youthful and simple - a baby blue dress, french knickers and a camisole top, a little negligee. “There is so much drama,” says Robertson, “you don't need layers of anything else.” In Pastor's naturalistic production, the story, the tension and the drama are all relayed through the body. “The movement expresses the emotion, not just the face,” says Robertson. “The movement starts the expression: he doesn't want facial movements just added on top.” It is, she says, “a challenge to do something very different”.

This is a contemporary style of dancing, with parallel work on the feet. For Pastor, it is what brings “the necessary weight to the performance. To have the feet flat, on the ground”. It will, he hopes, all add up to an accessible, moving Romeo and Juliet, where the audience does more than admire the pirouettes and hum along with the overture.

If the junior dancers' reactions are anything to go by, he has succeeded. “It takes me back to when I was at that stage,” says Robertson. “They sit and watch the rehearsals and say, 'I am not going to be able to watch this every night, I would sit and cry.'

“Even in the studio, at the end of the final scene, when I kill myself, you can hear a pin drop. I am really looking forward to hearing that silence of the audience when I'm on the stage.”

Scottish Ballet's Romeo and Juliet is at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre (May 13-17), His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen (May 21-24), Eden Court, Inverness (May 28-31) and the Theatre Royal, Glasgow (June 4-7)

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