Le Corsaire By Clement Crisp for The Financial Times
I heard on Monday of a man who thinks that every ballet should contain a shipwreck. And, considering the tosh we are offered by certain European doom merchants, this is no bad idea. What better proof, indeed, than the storm-tossed havoc at the beginning of Le Corsaire, with which the Kirov Ballet opened its London season.
Orchestral thunderings. Brilliant lighting, howling winds, mountainous seas: it is the best possible introduction to a staging which is so ludicrous - and so enjoyable - that we sit back and grin at the antics which bulge at the seams of its three acts. Its nearest equivalent is the Marx Brothers at the opera.
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A ship that failed to set sail Luke Jennings for The Daily Telegraph reviews the Kirov Ballet at Covent Garden
To open their London season, the Kirov Ballet have chosen a work that has been in the company's repertoire for more than a century. Loosely based on a poem by Lord Byron, Le Corsaire is a pirate epic freighted to the gunwales with cardboard theatrics, magic potions and implausible plot reversals.
The principal characters are Conrad, the eponymous corsair, and Medora, the Greek girl who hides him when he and his friends are shipwrecked and whom he later rescues from slavery at the hands of the Turks.
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