Long voyage

Le Corsaire, Don Quixote
Bolshoi Ballet, Royal Opera House

For many years in the West, Le Corsaire was just a pas de deux, a dazzling bravura number historically associated with male ballet legends such as Rudolph Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Then, in the mid-Eighties, the Kirov Ballet, now Marijinsky Ballet, came along with a fast-paced, colourful and highly entertaining complete version, loosely based on the much-interpolated 19th-century original. Since then, a few more versions have cropped up here and there, including the 2007 one signed by Alexei Ratmansky and Yuri Burlaka, respectively the former and current artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet.

Entertaining as it might be, Le Corsaire is not a masterwork. The dramatic adaptation of Byron’s poem is untenable and somewhat cheesy, criminally reduced to a mere pretext for as many nonsensical dance numbers and as many old-fashioned theatrical effects as possible. Hence my reservations about the Ratmansky/Burlaka version, which adds to what has hitherto been the ‘standard’ text more 19th-century-based extras, with dire consequences in terms of length and digestibility. It would appear that the two talented dance-makers indulged in restoring a profusion of long-forgotten dance numbers and narrative episodes that have little or no relevance to today’s ballet-goer, as their only function was to bestow that phoney local colour that 19th-century audiences craved. Personally, I would have happily done without some of the ‘character’ or pseudo-folklore dancing, and all the business with the Shah’s jealous favourite, her fights with the other harem girls, the more-than-laughable imprisonment of the main character, and all the lengthy, and not so well acted, slave-selling stuff in the opening market scene. Even I, a strenuous supporter of ballet mime, mentally begged to have less gesturing and to get more directly to the point: namely, pure ballet dancing — which was equally abundant, though not always exciting or memorable.