American Ballet Theatre has ended its brief London season with a staging that passes itself off as Le Corsaire. Just as well call it Ali Baba or perhaps more accurately Much Ado about Nothing, for it is a tedious and unlikely thing.

Gillian Murphy and Roman Zhurbin

The production, by Anne-Marie Holmes, claims mparentage from the Kirov Ballet version of half a century ago. We know how that great troupe displays it nowadays – with delicious wit and a prodigious sense of style. (The recent Bolshoi Ballet revision, by Alexey Ratmansky, restored tracts of early choreography and a not inconsiderable verve to the text.) This ABT affair resembles a Christmas pantomime, and not a good one either, played for laughs and whizz-bang bravura in classic style, and suggests that ballet as an art is concerned with high physical jinks and low comedy. The result is nearer Carry On Pasha than Byron, with whose poetic narrative it once alleged links.

Today we may not take Le Corsaire seriously, but we may hope its crazed narrative inspires – as in Russia – elegance of means in production as in performance. What we see with ABT is decrepit scenery, seriously unflattering costuming and talented artists tearing their hearts out to convince us that what they are doing is worthwhile – beyond the obvious appeals for applause as yet more pirouettes and fouettés and thigh-splitting leaps are flung at us with what looked to me like desperation.

Gillian Murphy, as Medora, the heroine, spun like several tops (and amazingly so) and emoted suitably, but the role is unyielding. I admired Marcelo Gomes as the hero, Conrad, for his commanding manner and his dignity even when provoked by the fatuities of the action, and Herman Cornejo was vivid in dance and drama as the slave-merchant Lankedem.

Other members of the cast obediently provided familiar virtuoso calling-cards, which were eagerly cheered, and there was a shipwreck (no ballet should be without one, declared a friend) and a horde of tiresome tots prancing among the roses of the Jardin Animé. Veronika Part appeared, a divinity in exile, as an odalisque. The orchestra was called upon to play very loudly. ★★☆☆☆