La Fille Mal Gardée is a charming tale of love and frustration amongst country folk. Until very recently, the only version known in this country was Sir Frederick Ashton’s masterpiece, premiered to huge cheers in 1960. The Russians have now brought us Gorsky’s version of 1901, which inspired Ashton to re-make it. There are great similarities, but Ashton hated Hertel’s sugary score and used music by Herold instead. His Fille is undoubtedly superior, but Gorsky’s is a delight in its own right.

Lise loves Colas, a young farmer, but her mother, Widow Simone, has arranged for her to marry Alain, the simpleton son of a rich landowner. The humour is mainly in the tricks villagers play on Alain, a bit non-PC nowadays, but the story is so sunny and light-hearted that the unfortunate boy’s loss of bride doesn’t seem to matter to him or anyone else. He rides his wooden horse and wields his butterfly net and hardly knows what’s going on.

Denis Pogorely is wonderful in the role; with his tragic-comic clown’s face and his rag-doll floppiness, he wins our sympathy, even though we’re supposed to be rooting for Colas. He shows he can really dance, too. Elena Pogorelaya makes a lovely Lise. Her dancing is light and easy and she has some big solos, including, for some reason, a tarantella. She is a likeable comed-ienne who can also be moving, as in the scene where she imagines herself married to Colas, with three young children to look after.

But what’s wrong with Vyacheslav Kapustin? Colas is supposed to be madly in love with Lise, but looks sulky and doesn’t even crack a smile when taking his curtain call. He can dance well enough, but there’s no sparkling chemistry or passion. All the same, this is a highly enjoyable work and a collectors’ item for British audiences.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the Siberians gave their Swan Lake, much re-choreographed by director Sergei Bobrov, but with the iconic passages intact. He stuck on a peculiar ending: instead of Odette and Siegfried dying together in the lake, to be together in eternity, Siegfried carries the evil Von Rothbart into the churning waters, and they both drown, leaving Odette alone and distraught on the shore.

La Fille Mal Gardée
Russian State Ballet of Siberia
New Theatre, Oxford