Carlos Acosta made his London debut in Spartacus, and it was every bit as spectacular as you'd expect.

Cuban-born Acosta is a huge star, a regular fixture with the Royal Ballet where his dazzling technique and mohair manners are box office gold. Acosta is such a physically gifted dancer that he can seem hemmed in by the Royal, whose restrained style is more about holding back than letting rip.

Not so the Bolshoi, which is a big, bold company, and its Spartacus is the biggest and boldest ballet of them all.

In fact, if you combined a Broadway show with a Hollywood blockbuster and a Red Square military parade it would still be only half the size of Spartacus.

First staged in 1968 by Yuri Grigorovich, this Soviet era epic tells the story of the gladiator who led a slave revolt against Rome in 73BC. This being the Soviet era, it is also an allegory of the proletariat rising up against Tsarist tyranny and/or the Nazis, complete with humbly toiling peasants and saluting, goose-stepping, lascivious overlords.

It's Las Vegas from start to last, but with the right dancer in the title role, you happily sign up to the people's revolt.

Surprisingly, Acosta made a faltering start. There were some fluffed moves in the first duet with his sweetheart Phrygia (Anna Antonicheva) and some unexpected straining to his early leaps.

For the first time it seemed as if Acosta was under-rehearsed, although the simple fact is that he doesn't know the ballet as well as the Russians who are literally weaned on Spartacus.

The other distraction is that Acosta dances very differently from the Bolshoi.

They have a crystal efficiency, strong and implacable, whereas Acosta has a plushness, an almost feather-soft halo to all his moves. Next to the Russians, this makes him look less precise than he is and somehow out of sync.

However, as you watch Spartacus for boom-a-bang dancing, this stylistic subtlety probably doesn't matter. And the dancing was fabulous. Acosta soared as the noble slave you'd follow into battle, Alexander Volchkov was an awesome Crassus, the evil leader of the Roman Army, and Maria Allash was a wonderfully wanton Courtesan who seduces Spartacus loyalists with wine and whores.

There were also uniformly strong performances from the corps, while the Orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre went for Khachaturian's monumental score hammer and tongs.

• Spartacus runs until 8 August. The Bolshoi Ballet's London visit runs until 18 August. For more information, call 0870 145 0200 or visit www.eno.org/bolshoi