There’s a glorious logic to the fact that the Trocks, an all-male ballet troupe, camp as Christmas, have become guardians of the fragile curios of the classical repertory. Take Petipa’s carnival romp, Les Millions d’Arlequin (1900), which as far as I know hasn’t appeared on the straight ballet stage in aeons. With its skippily exuberant Harlequin and friends, and a Columbine as cutely winsome as a porcelain figurine, the work’s sugar content is now way too high for a modern audience.
But given the Trocks’s treatment of sharp-eyed pastiche and comic spin, the ballet gets a robust and weirdly credible reincarnation. There’s a lot of recognisable Petipa on stage, and all the tricks of parody (the exaggerated head tilts and gestural flourishes) simply focus the accuracy of the choreography’s reconstruction. Even when the Trocks let rip with their own physical gags, they never stray far from the ballet’s own world.
