Not vintage Mariinsky

Not really a vintage Mariinsky season — an odd choice of repertoire and some hit-and-miss male casting — but the Covent Garden run ended on a glorious high.

Marius Petipa’s La Bayadère is a lightly curried love triangle about a handsome warrior torn between his betrothed (a Rajah’s daughter) and a beautiful temple dancer. Old-fashioned? You bet. But the scenery is chewed with such relish and the choreo-graphy delivered with such radiant commitment that the three hours roll by in a lime-lit haze — you half expect an audience in dress uniforms and tiaras.

The scenery, a pick-and-mix from the 1877 premiere and the 1900 revival, adds to the sense of time travel with a Rousseau-esque sacred forest for Act One and a masterclass in two-point perspective from Matvei Shishkov for the Rajah’s palace.

The Royal Ballet’s Bayadère makes do with fewer servants than Downton Abbey but Petipa’s ballet à grand spectacle was conceived and staged with orientalist largesse. Our hero arrives at the Act Two engagement party astride an elephant and the original défilé featured 230 dancers, figurants and flagellants together with a dozen small girls in chocolate-coloured fleshings: la danse de négrillons.

You won’t see négrillons in the American Ballet Theatre or Covent Garden productions but they live on in Moscow, St Petersburg and Paris, an odd but instructive reminder of bygone sins. Hardliners would like to see them airbrushed from the ballet stage, the same healing spirit that has purged Petrushka from the repertoire (remember the Moor worshipping his coconut?), but where do you draw the line? There is hardly a classic in the canon without its share of ‘cultural appropriation’ and dodgy racial stereotypes. What price the Chinese dance in Nutcracker? Commission an explanatory programme note by all means, give a talk beforehand but start blue-pencilling a turbaned, navel-jewelled extravaganza like La Bayadère or Le Corsaire and there would be nothing left but tights, tutus and toe shoes; all the fun, all the fragrance would evaporate.