Boris Eifman is often tagged as Russia's answer to Maurice Bejart, sharing the latter's taste for flamboyant stages and vaulting storylines. In Red Giselle (1997) he's certainly set the bar ambitiously high. Not only does he attempt to conjure the body and soul of the great Russian ballerina Olga Spessivtzeva, but in narrating her decline from stardom into madness he also tries to evoke the traumatic historical backdrop to her career.
It's a double act which requires Eifman to shuttle rapidly between social pageant and intense, symbolic close-up, but he manages to tell a complicated story in efficiently fast and broad strokes. The early scenes are the most conventionally balletic as the plot follows Olga's transition from dancer with the Imperial Ballet to prima ballerina of revolutionary Petrograd. But as her fragile personality is increasingly torn between the demands of her autocratic ballet master and her domineering Bolshevik lover, Eifman's invention starts to spark. He sets up some ingeniously brutal duets and trios which allow his heroine to be tugged between two philosophies, two epochs, two men. He then pulls off the neat conceit of showing Olga being literally forced to dance to a different rhythm as the Soviet era ousts her from her old world.
Once in Paris Olga's mental breakdown is theatrically accelerated, and her disintegration cleverly pointed by scenes from the ballet Giselle. This is the work in which Spessivtzeva danced her greatest role and with which she came obsessively to identify. The ballerina's own miserable love affairs fuse with her character's anguish and in the final scene Olga disappears into a mirror image of herself, never to recover her sanity.
Eifman's company is much happier in those scenes which use his personal dance idiom to tell the story. Vera Arbuzova is hopelessly ill-equipped to mimic the exquisite technique of the real Spessivtzeva. However she does create a very focused image of Olga's shattered psyche and Eifman's choreography is equally at its best when dealing with the big, off balance moments. His style is a curious, sometimes strident mix of faux classicism, silent movie melodrama, Soviet epic and angular expressionism, and its ability to ride a climax is paralleled by the equally shameless but equally suggestive score of Tchaikovsky, Bizet and Schnitke. Parts of this ballet are crude and parts are creaky but somehow the package works. Helped by the stylishly re sourceful designs of Viasheslav Okunev and a peculiarly Russian conviction, Red Giselle tells an unexpectedly good yarn.
· Until February 13. Box office: 020-7863 8000.
