Russia may have changed massively since Grigorovich’s Spartacus first hymned Soviet ideals in 1968 with dance that busted blocks rather in the manner of Cecil B. de Mille, but the choreography’s power and emotional kick are still potent. Today, in this regional tour by the Bolshoi Ballet, it is what it ever was: thumping politics as thumping good theatre. Yet it is its subtext, quite as much as its ideology, that now fascinates us.

In 1968, the 39-year-old Grigorovich was making a bid for national recognition by taking on a score and a theme that had already defeated two experienced choreographers (Leonid Jacobson and Igor Moyseyev). He moved on from the social and political verismo of Soviet dram- ballet to a larger and more grandly expressive form in which he reworked narrative and score. A Leningrader, he had youthful knowledge of his native city’s sufferings in the war, and exorcised them by showing Rome’s oppressive militarism in terms of the goose-stepping German army. And he shifted the centre of theatrical attention away from the ballerina to the heroic possibilities of the Bolshoi’s tremendous men: Vladimir Vasiliev, the first Spartacus, was the hero as flame of belief; Mikhail Lavrovsky was the hero as idealist; 20 years later Irek Mukhamedov was the hero as hero.

All this we can sense in the current performances as the Bolshoi shows off this uneven but glorious work: in part poster art, in part elegy, in part a quest (most unusual at its creation) for greater psychological motivation for its chief players, and in everything an emotional blow to our collective solar plexus.

The present Bolshoi troupe dances it very well, albeit with some reduction in forces: no stage in Britain can provide space to equal its Moscow theatre’s arena, in which Grigorovich’s lines of action and his often brilliant shaping of ensembles demand our submission to the power of muscle and dramatic projection. And dramatic belief. “Only believe” is the dancers’ message to us, and with Yury Klevstov’s untiring Spartacus (the hero as vulnerable man), with Alexander Volchkov’s Crassus – more elegant and highly strung than many previous interpreters – and with Svetlana Lunkina’s pathetic and beautiful Phrygia and Maria Alexandrova’s potently commanding Aegina, we see the ballet and believe.

It is like time-travelling nowadays when we watch Spartacus (even unto its hilariously un-erotic orgies) as also when watching the old Mariinsky shenanigans of Petipa’s Raymonda, but Grigorovich’s vision, and his artists’ tremendous command of style, make the experience fascinating. ★★★★☆

Tel 870 111 2000