Spartacus is the Bolshoi's butch ballet. When Yuri Grigorivich's 1968 production came to the UK, its big and bold male dancing made the more lyrical English ballet style look effete. It is now so emblematic of a certain heroic Russian style, it is hard to watch without some knowing irony. Like a 1950s swords-and-sandals film, its beefy posturing can seem very hammy.

But that's part of its pleasure. Spartacus is a rollicking historical epic mixed from classic ingredients: conflict, pride, lust, decadence and deceipt. The plot is less important for its details than as the field in which these themes are played out. The main thing is to keep the passion high, the spectacle up and the action going.

Dmitri Belogolovtsev is a terrific Spartacus, a straightforward action hero who can launch himself across the stage in sequences of big, dambusting bounds. Galina Stepenenko relishes the bad-girl role of Aegina, snaking her come-hither arms and insinuating her instep up the pole of a lusty gladiator. Anna Antonicheva dances Phrygia, Spartacus's beloved, with poise and verve, but Vladimir Neporozhny seems miscast as arch-villain Crassus, less a brutal commander than a reluctant baddie.

The action is swept along by the charged currents of Khachaturian's overblown music. The choreography itself is never subtle, broadcasting every emotion (bent heads for sorrow, rigid arms for resolve) and signposting every physical feat with a see-it-coming preparation. It is sometimes sensational - as in the sky-high lifts in Spartacus and Phrygia's duet - but it can just as easily tip into music-hall camp. The goose-stepping Roman soldiers are sometimes a hair's breadth from looking like a high-kicking chorus line.

Indulging in its eroticised spectacles of barbarism, prowess and combat, Spartacus is itself a kind of gladiatorial arena with the audience as its crowd.