Music: Bolshoi Ballet Abroad

For two weeks Moscow’s world-famed Bolshoi Theater Ballet—scheduled to make its first full-scale appearance outside the Soviet Union—had kept London’s ballet fans on tenterhooks. Eighty tons of scenery already rested on a London dock when balletomanes heard that the company would not come unless British authorities dropped charges against Nina Ponomaryeva, the husky discus thrower who is charged with shoplifting (TIME, Sept. 10); the authorities stood pat. When the Russians decided to come anyway, the three jet airliners carrying the troupe found the London airport weathered in, had to land miles away at a U.S. fighter base in Mansion, Kent. But last week in London’s Royal Opera House the curtain rose at last, and only ten minutes late. The show proved worth the wait.

The evening’s ballet was Romeo and Juliet, danced in settings of overwhelming —if old-fashioned—grandeur and verisimilitude. The dancing, to the Prokofiev score and with few differences from the ballet film now showing in the U.S.. was heavily larded with emotion-laden pantomime. But fragile Ballerina Galina Ulanova danced lightly as a wind-wafted feather in spite of her 46 years. Most critics were ecstatic. The Times critic described her as “now like a flame on the ground, now like a flame leaping in the air.” Wrote the News Chronicle: “Her arms and hands raised in flight are sheer poetry.” Sadler’s Wells’ Margot Fonteyn, whom many rate the West’s greatest ballerina, was moved to tears of admiration. Said she: “This is magical. Now we know what we’ve been missing. I cannot even begin to discuss the dancing of Ulanova because she is something so magnificent I cannot even put it into words.”

The few carpers pointed out that the Bolshoi style had become frozen at a pre-revolutionary epoch. Sadler’s Wells School

Director Arnold Haskell wrote that it was “the most reactionary ballet it is possible to imagine. Its virtues and its faults are those of half a century ago.” But the applauding crowd. Prime Minister Anthony Eden among them, could not clap enough. In return the audience got a traditional Russian reaction: the entire cast and Bolshoi officials stood on the stage and applauded back.