As a Marxist romp - Groucho rather than Karl - The Pharaoh's Daughter takes some beating. Lord Wilson, an intrepid ancestor of Captain Spalding, visits the pyramids during a sandstorm, time-travels back to Pharaonic times, turns into the heroic Ta-hor and falls in love with Aspicia, the eponymous daughter, saves her from a lion and from marriage to the king of Nubia and returns to the 1860s a wiser if not better observer of matters Egyptian. And all this by way of yards of Cesare Pugni music, a monkey, a cobra in an urn of flowers, rank upon rank of slaves, soldiery, huntresses, high priests, fisher-folk, and the rivers Congo, Neva and Guadalquivir, whom our heroine meets when she jumps into the Nile in order to escape marriage to the heavily jewelled Nubian. (She is, as they say, in denial). Confused? Of course, as we all were when the Bolshoi Ballet presented this final work in their season. But delighted, too.

The Pharaoh's Daughter was Marius Petipa's first grand spectacular, staged in St Petersburg in 1861 and then in Moscow. It survived until the Soviet 1920s, adored alike by ballerinas and by the public. It has been the devotion of Pierre Lacotte to restoring certain of these old ballets to the stage that has brought the present example to life. Most of the steps are gone beyond recall, but Lacotte's researches, his sense of period and of style, mean that if not authentic (and he would not claim this) his productions are skilfully "like", and convince.

I reported with pleasure on this staging four years ago when it was new, and it looked fine in this London debut. Only the Bolshoi has the dramatic tradition to make its rachitic drama work. Only the Bolshoi can field such legions of dancers to leap and wield bows and spears, and whip through academic ensembles with such glassy assurance. And only the Bolshoi can present, in Svetlana Zakharova and Sergey Filin, two artists with the technical bravura and the emotional allure to make the piece so attractive.

Zakharova dances Aspicia with dazzling assurance and exquisite sensibilities. She brings such charm of manner to the role that we understand exactly why it was so revered by the old ballerinas. Filin, launched into a series of devilish solos that demand purest style, is a hero - not when killing a lion, but as he beats and turns and deploys all the battery of male technique with nonchalant mastery. Tremendous. But them the whole affair is tremendous: tremendous nonsense and tremendous fun.