History has played strange tricks with the two Soviet ballets performed by the Bolshoi this week. Shostakovich's The Bright Stream, with its ideologically compliant libretto of love on a collective farm, was banned within a year of its premiere. Prokofiev's Cinderella, on the other hand, won the admiration of the Kremlin, despite sending out blithely anti-communist messages about virtue being rewarded with a palace and a prince.
Half a century later, however, the cards are being redealt. While Alexei Ratmansky's brimming, witty re-creation of The Bright Stream looks set for a permanent place in the repertory, it is hard to judge Yuri Possokhov's new setting of Cinderella as anything other than a short-term experiment.
There is, to be fair, an interestingly inquisitive energy in this Cinderella, as Possokhov deconstructs the traditional fairytale into a series of abstracted scenes, all framed by a lone storyteller figure - aka Prokofiev. Some of the scenes are genuinely entertaining (the fat and funny step-sisters learning to dance); some aspire to cosmic grandeur (Cinderella and her prince walking through an array of ticking clocks towards the stars); and some aspire to a very postmodern knowingness (the live video feed of conductor Alexander Vedernikov leading the Bolshoi orchestra through the overture). But what's dispiriting is that most of these smart ideas remain just that - ideas. Without the anchorage of a sustained choreographic imagination, this Cinderella feels like a puzzle of badly fitting pieces, rattling around a gorgeously performed score.
The contrast with Bright Stream couldn't be more telling. All that's left of this 1935 ballet is its Shostakovich score and some detailed notes written by its original choreographer, Fedor Lopukhov. Yet while Ratmansky shows a sharp sense of historical irony in its reconstruction, he adroitly avoids crushing or distorting the ballet's spirit. When a formation of model tractors and Soviet planes whisk across Boris Messerer's deliciously surreal, pastoral sky, we hoot happily, but we're never invited to patronise. On the contrary: as Ratmansky unfolds the story of farm workers being thrown into a romantic tizzy by a pair of visiting ballet dancers, he succeeds in giving us a weirdly vivid taste of what might once have counted as populist Soviet ballet - a recipe of madcap pranks (a man in a dog suit riding a bicycle); beguilingly innocent flirtations; and a riot of dancing in every folk, classical and popular style you can list.
· The Bolshoi season continues until August 19. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
