When ballets are as big and as bonkers as Le Corsaire, all you can do is watch and wonder.

You shouldn't try to read the programme or fathom the plot, let alone keep tabs on which Greek maid loves what corsair, or how many times she is kidnapped, then rescued, then kidnapped again.

Don't attempt to work out where it's set, or when it happens, or whether it's a whizz-bang rom-com or grand morality tale.

This new Corsaire, premiered in Moscow a few weeks ago, hasn't worked it out either. The ballet is a riot of plot twists, mood swings, and flouncy trousers, with the pirates (corsairs) fighting each other, fighting the eunuchs and rescuing the slave girls.

It's Pirates of the Coliseum one minute, Sleeping Beauty the next, and Dido and Aeneas the next, a see-sawing that leaves you tired and baffled. The barminess, and marathon length (three-and-a-half hours), won't bother enthusiasts.

This is the Bolshoi, one of the biggest and best ballet companies in the world and it's in London for three weeks.

Even if this is over-long and emotionally slight, the dancers are dazzlingly good. Denis Matvienko, the corsair of the title, is poetry in tights.

His cashmere leaps and accelerating spins are gorgeous and give his character the oomph and enthusiasm the swashbuckler requires.

Long-limbed Svetlana Zakharova is less well cast as the heroine Medora.

An icily perfect, über-elegant dancer, she is a little too grand to portray the "young Greek woman" described in the programme.

But her pin-perfect spins are wonderful, even if she gives them more hauteur than emotional depth.

That's the rub. The production has oodles of style but almost no heart. The dancers play it big, somehow spurning the inherent comedy but skip the seriousness their grandness requires.

There is also, to London eyes, considerable cheesiness in the corps de ballet, with the odalisques so coy in Act II that you almost mistake them for Benny Hill playthings.

The plinky-plonky musical patchwork doesn't help, nor do the sets that seem to trip the dancers on every turn.

Much better was the pas de trois in Act II, with Anna Nikulina, Ekaterina Krysanova and Natalia Osipova combining both girlish charm and sensuous grace.