Dancing up a La Mancha storm

The trouble with Don Quixote is Don Quixote. Whenever the doddering, delusional Don is onstage, tilting at windmills, riding his straw-and-sawdust nag on wheels, jousting with bedposts, our spirits and sympathies suffer. Quixote’s quest only really works as an excuse for Kitri, Basilio, Espada the Matador and Mercedes the street minx to dance up a La Mancha storm. This they do, with bells on. In toreador waistcoat, tight taleguilla and pink stockings to match his cape, Ryoichi Hirano is the Mata-phwoar. The corps de ballet swoon and flutter. He is sexy, even caddish. I was a Hirano doubter, but this was a magnificent performance: athletic power matched by classical control. A bullfighter one moment, ballerino the next.

Laura Morera as his firebrand lover Mercedes is underpowered. She was so extraordinarily good as the temptress gypsy in The Two Pigeons, yet here, in a similar role, she is subdued. An off-colour night, perhaps. It is partly the fault of the choreography, reworked by Carlos Acosta in 2013 after Marius Petipa’s 1869 ballet. Mercedes is given very much less to do than the other three. The music, by Ludwig Minkus, is irresistible: a riot of waltz, fandango and tambourine.

Marianela Nunez as Kitri comes on all guns blazing, all castanets clacking. She is giddy and playful, teasing and proud. Kitri, the innkeeper’s daughter, loves the young barber Basilio (Vadim Muntagirov). Who wouldn’t? One could quibble that Muntagirov is entirely improbable as a swarthy Spaniard — his looks and bearing are more St Petersburg drawing room than bar-room brawl — but at the end of the first and third acts my cheeks ached from smiling. One rarely talks of male dancers being lovely, but there is a lovely lightness to Muntagirov, an infectious gaiety and joie de danse.