Travelling at the speed of light

Dance

Bolshoi Ballet

Coliseum LONDON

Everything old is indeed new again. The current artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, Alexei Ratmansky, 39, has been in the job for only three years. Determinedly forward-looking, he has already brought several American and European choreographers into the fold for the first time. Yet his two major projects so far have been firmly linked to the celebration of the company's Russian heritage.

Last summer's big hit, when the company played the Royal Opera House, was Ratmansky's staging of The Bright Stream. Composed by Shostakovich, instantaneously banned by Stalin, this rollicking Soviet satire dates from 1935. It will be back on the London stage as the happy finale to this year's Bolshoi season, 16 to 18 August.

Ratmansky's main project for 2007 has been a revival of Le Corsaire. Unlike The Bright Stream, Le Corsaire has never really left the Russian repertoire. But over the past hundred years or so it has been chopped and changed in all sorts of ways. The version re- created here is the 1899 staging by Marius Petipa, the alfa male choreographer of all time. It was the last of his three renditions of a ballet that had actually begun life in Paris in 1856. Ratmansky's stated goal is to get as close to the 1899 Petipa production as he and his design team could manage.

The outcome is a real surprise, illustrating just how far other productions have gradually strayed away from the original. It is estimated that about 50 per cent of this new Bolshoi production is authentic Petipa, the rest of the choreography supplied by Ratmansky and his colleague, the Petipa scholar Yuri Burlaka.

The curtain rises on a boisterous sun-drenched, seaside market square. The horrific conflict between Greeks and Turks that inspired the Byron poem which serves as the very tangential premise for this ballet is best forgotten. It should be replaced by evocations of post-war Saturday matinees at the cinema - think Flash Gordon, Roy Rogers or Superman.

In rapid succession we get slave girls, pirates, partisans, a libidinous pasha with more money than sense, kidnaps, double- dealings, drugged flowers, more kidnaps, more pirates and more double-dealings, followed by a shipwreck. Along the way we stumble across some sublime dancing, notably the astoundingly elaborate "Jardin Anime", surely the reason why Petipa bothered with Le Corsaire in the first place.

This grand, luscious and lengthy display, for dozens upon dozens of female dancers, is the ballet's most scrumptious sequence. Taking up a large chunk of the second act it fizzingly encapsulates the ebullient joy of ballet's pure, delightfully old-fashioned perfection. The music for 'Le Jardin Anime is' by Delibes, one of the seven Le Corsaire composers involved here. But Adolph Adam of Giselle fame is credited with the lion's share of the music. The others contribute plenty of pleasing tunes of their own, though few of them manage to negotiate beyond rousing oom-pah-pahs. The Bolshoi's orchestra, under the baton of Pavel Kinichev, have a high old time cantering through the wonderfully frivolous score.

'Le Jardin Anime' is one of the indisputable treasures of the classical canon and Ratmansky does it proud, even if the Coliseum stage - one of Lon-don's largest - proves a bit too cramped for the multitudinous Bolshoi.

The opening night performance was headed by the Bolshoi's reigning prima ballerina Svetlana Zakharova. Both tall and strong, she is an outstanding technician, but I have to admit that I find her more efficient than charming, and she has a distressing habit of overriding - rather than listening to - the music. Ultimately, Zakharova is one of those dancers who seems more interested in herself than in the ballet she is dancing.

Her corsaire swain, Conrad, was danced by the Ukrainian-born Denis Matvienko. He brought a vigorous tongue-in-cheek panache to the proceedings and high-flying pyrotechnics to his dancing. His major pas de deux with Zakharova takes place early on in the evening. This is the duet that was first made famous in the West as a party piece for Fonteyn and Nureyev. It is now a ubiquitous feature of galas and also frequently turns up in ballet competitions. A real testing ground for both of its dancers, this is a crowd-pleasing showstopper.

During 'Le Jardin Anime' Zakharova shares the dancing honours with another leading Bolshoi ballerina, Ekaterina Shipulina, whose soft and pliant style that perfectly suits Petipa's lush vision of femininity.

Avid Bolshoi watchers know that there are a pair of youngsters in the company who are zooming towards celebrity at the speed of light. Natalia Osipova, 21, and Ivan Vasiliev, 18, will be leading the much anticipated first performance of Don Quixote on Thursday. Here they each put in tantalisingly brief, but impressive appearances in subsidiary roles.

All in all this production is a visual feast, a virtual thesis in the arts of theatrical reconstruction. The settings are by Boris Kaminsky. They sparkle with bright, old-fashioned clarity.