The Bright Stream

Published Monday 14 August 2006 at 11:20 by John Percival

Now here’s a really entertaining creation from the Bolshoi Ballet, warmly cheered by the London audience - so why are there only two showings here? The Bright Stream is a collective farm in the steppes, where two dancers come to perform at harvest festival. The ballerina and their hostess (lovely Svetlana Lunkina) prove to be old friends from dancing school and the comical disguises they initiate overcome a series of ludicrous improprieties. Fyodor Lopokov created the ballet in 1935 but Stalin disapproved so it disappeared, but now Alexei Ratmansky’s stylish evocation brings back to life Lopokov’s clever plot and Shostakovich’s wonderfully colourful score.

So we can enjoy Sergei Filin in skirts and toe-shoes as the tough Sylphide who taunts naughty bearded dacha-dweller Alexei Loparevich and Maria Alexandrova as the twinkling ballerina hidden under her partner’s suit to fool the stupid wife (Irina Zibrova). Meanwhile naive schoolgirl Galya (Anastasia Stashkevich) proves bright enough to thwart the dancers’ deliciously lecherous accordionist - another brilliant cameo from Gennady Yanin - and Lunkina wins back her straying husband (Yuri Klevtsov). These and other fascinating solo parts are set within richly animated group dances for the locals, including a mock battle between rival workers from the Caucasus and Kuban. Ratmansky has the nowadays rare gift for choreographing ensembles.

The ballet is vastly helped by Boris Messerer’s designs, a masterly recreation of Soviet art, the Bolshoi orchestra’s liveliness under Pavel Sorokin’s direction of the highly danceable music and by the apparent enjoyment of the whole cast in this restitution of a long-lost delight.