Turkish delight

I’ve seen some people saying that English National Ballet’s Le Corsaire is so out-of-date it’s risible to see it staged in the 21st century. Sex trafficking, men in black with scimitars in Istanbul, pirates trading slaves across the Mediterranean, rich fat men rubbing their jewelled paws over fresh young bodies — pshaw indeed!

But I’d like to have heard Tamara Rojo, ENB’s artistic director, pitch to her board and sponsors to get the shiploads of doubloons she needed to stage it with the bling and panache its spectacle requires. An even tougher sell might have been getting her multiracial dancers on board with playing slaves and slave-dealers. So yes, I reckon Le Corsaire is bang-on current as a project.

The front curtain tells us the unlikely fact that the story is based on Lord Byron’s poem about the buccaneering corsair — fortunately not a whit more respectfully than the Don Quixote ballet of about the same period is based on Cervantes. That is, it simply provides any excuse for exotic scenery and exultantly energetic classical dancing — hokum and proud of it.

Bob Ringwood’s Istanbul vista and his succulent costumes are worth the ticket price alone; and the music, knocked up with brazen theatricality from contributions by ten composers, performs that vital but rarely found function of seizing you by the ears and telling you exactly what to feel — ‘Pay attention! This is going to be exciting!’ orders the overture; ‘They’re all doomed!’ warns the Act 3 prelude.

There are useful similarities to This is Spinal Tap, in which a boyband — here, the pirates led by Conrad — has its emotional ecology disturbed by a woman — here Medora — with the subsequent wrecking of the boyband.