Spartacus in spandex

It’s togas-a-go-go as the Bolshoi bring Yuri Grigorovich’s 1956 ballet Spartacus to the Royal Opera House. Oh dear, I did giggle. This is Spartacus in spandex with gladiatorial G-strings and slave girls dressed for Thracian strip shows. On comes Crassus (Artemy Belyakov) in the Roman empire’s tiniest tunic with a legion of soldiers swinging their shields like Gucci manbags. But what dancing: disciplined, muscular, nakedly heroic. Very Soviet.

Denis Rodkin is a mighty Spartacus, all vengeful savagery and outraged buttocks. There isn’t a dancer in the Royal Ballet to match his stamina, his power, his splits and leaps, his reckless stretching beyond possible endurance. True, there is more gurning than acting, but naturalism has never been a hallmark of Russian ballet.

Anastasia Denisova as Phrygia, sweetheart to Spartacus, was fragile and uncertain. Her lines are exquisite, her precision painstaking, but there was a gymslip gaucheness to her performance that made you nervous on her behalf. Svetlana Zakharova as Aegina, courtesan and lover to Crassus, not only steals the show, but holds it captive and demands a ransom. She shares with the Royal Ballet’s Marianela Nunez a palpable happiness in dancing. Two years ago, I interviewed Zakharova in Moscow and she told me, her translator reaching for the right word, that she loved to play ‘the hooligan’. Her Aegina is imperious and impish, feline and cruel. She is like a gorgeous cobra. Crassus, coming over all Sid James, can’t keep his hands off her. Zakharova is 40. See her while you can.

Golden fleeces for the Three Shepherds  (Mikhail Kochan, Georgy Gusev and Alexei Putinstev) who do for shepherd’s crooks what Gene Kelly did for the umbrella in Singin’ in the Rain. Who needs a female partner when the props are this good? Silly, yes.