It’s rather morbid yet poetic that for principal Chan Hon Goh’s final show with the National Ballet Company after 20 years, she would be playing the title role of Giselle, a girl driven to madness and suicide but whose spirit is later freed as it ascends to the heavens.

The two-act performance, in the NBC’s repertoire since its inception almost 60 years ago, is best described as a rom-com-turned-Night on Bald Mountain. It’s Victorian to a tee, with themes of love, class distinction, betrayal, remorse and forgiveness.

A count (Zdenek Konvalina) disguises himself as a farmer to be with the peasant Giselle. When she finds out that her lover was not only a count but also engaged, Giselle impales herself with a sword and her restless spirit drifts in the moors with other scorned female apparitions, a lithe but malevolent coup led by its queen, danced perfectly by a cold and stern Heather Ogden. When the count stumbles upon Giselle’s ghost and begs for her forgiveness, the en-pointe pack of angry spirits condemns the cheating man to — wait for it — dance to his death with continuous entrechats-six (jumping while rapidly crossing and uncrossing the legs).

Dance buffs would know that Rudolf Nureyev made this solo famous in the '60s by doing 16 consecutive leaps, and while Konvalina is nowhere near breaking Nureyev’s record, his boyish demeanor, combined with clean lines (his leg looks like it’s two metres long when he does an arabesque) and crisp double tours en l’air make him anyone’s Prince Charming. So when Giselle overcomes her anger and forgives the count, the other spirits disappear and her ghost fades peacefully into the background.

Goh, who, eerily, does not look a day over 17 even though she’s 40, isn’t ending her career with the most technically demanding role, but during one solo her impressive and applause-inducing grande jetés en tournant around the stage, an exhausting move performed more often by men than women, shows that, unlike her ill-fated character, Goh isn’t dancing gently into that good night.