“Wonderful! But why only one show?”

As the curtain falls on the current season, the Mikhailovsky Theatre has one last gift in store for ballet lovers: Laurencia is returning home after its long overseas voyage. This exemplary work of ‘Stalinist classicism’, whose agility and intensity recall the explosive release of a tightly coiled steel spring, will be performed on 22 and 23 July.

The recent absence of Laurencia from our stage was due to the fact that the ballet and its set had travelled across the ocean for a tour of Japan. A one-off performance was given in Tokyo’s largest performing arts centre, Bunka Kaikan, at the beginning of this year. The production, which features Irina Perren and Ivan Vasiliev, was a resounding success with the Japanese audience. Local theatre bloggers, as if in unison, opened their reviews with the complaint that the ballet company’s two-week tour produced just one performance of Laurencia: “Wonderful! But why only one show?”

Laurencia is not to be found in the repertoires of other Russian ballet theatres. It last featured on our playbill six years ago to mark the centenary of leading choreographer Vakhtang Chabukiani’s birth. After the Russian première, Mikhail Messerer’s version of the ballet earned recognition abroad, and became one of the Mikhailovsky Theatre’s calling cards on the international stage.

After the London tour of 2013, the veteran British ballet critic Clement Crisp described the production in Financial Times as: “a brave showcase for an entire troupe — which the present luminaries transform into something powerful.”