Even before the all-male Trocks (as they’re now known worldwide) had set a single pointe shoe on-stage, they were causing a feel-good factor of fun among the audience. Folk behind me were already chortling as they scanned the programme and read out the dancers’ names: Colette Adae, Olga Supphozova, Sveltlana Lofatkina (Try it at home).
There’s a further stoking of the larky, cod-Rooshian ambience with various announcements that pay off with “our bellerinass are in vurry,vurry goot mooood” – a sly nod in the direction of the volatile artistic temperament associated with so many legendary Russian dancers. Then it’s into one of the Trocks’ signature spoofs, Swan Lake (Act Two), with its corps-de-ballet all in a flap and serving up the kind of mishaps – collisions, falls, mis-timings – that we suspect hover under the surface of the “real thing”.
