The Pharaoh's Daughter Bolshoi Ballet, Royal Opera House, London WC2

A travelling British toff, Lord Wilson (his servant is called John Bull), gets caught in a storm in Egypt right next to a convenient pyramid, which happens also to be an opium den. In his drug-induced dream, the sarcophagus of a pharaoh's dead daughter, Aspicia, rises to join him. Lord Wilson instantly becomes an Egyptian love god, Taor, in a skimpy white tunic and glossy hairstyle.

The Pharaoh's Daughter was the final offering in the Bolshoi's three-week season, the British premiere of Pierre Lacotte's loving restoration of one of the lost treasures of the pre-revolutionary heyday of the 1860s.

As a theatrical spectacle, it is Aida meets Indiana Jones at the Paris Lido, with a pantomime lion, a poisonous snake lurking in a flower pot, a majestically irate King of Nubia who is promised to Aspicia, an underwater ballet in the Nile and, unfortunately, a blackamoor dressed in a chocolate-coloured suit with bulging white eyes.

The joint really starts jumping in the palace, which is like party night at the British Museum when all the artefacts get up and dance. There is, you will be unamazed to learn, a happy ending. The pharaoh relents, the Nubian king goes off with a flea in his ear, the English lord wakes up with a grin on his face.

Lacotte's revival, using an informed and partly reconstructed idea of what Petipa's original choreography was like, also restores the forgotten score of Cesare Pugni, a composer who wrote music for more than 300 ballets. There are rousing processions, a Spanish-sounding number with castanets, a lot of flim-flam and brassy flatulence, sure, but always an engaging, functional framework for the dancers.

As a bolshy Bolshoi virgin, I have marvelled these past few days at the beauty, skill and precision of the corps, even in the unjustly derided Romeo and Juliet, where the Bolshoi spirit and style informed an uncharacteristic foray into modern dance. There is the odd howler of design and, especially, lighting. The opening scene of The Pharaoh's Daughter is incomprehensible. But it doesn't matter when the dancing starts. The company is irresistible.

The solos and duets of Svetlana Zakharova as Aspicia and Sergei Filin as Taor were simply astounding. If Egyptian archaeology means digging up such artistry, the price of a tourist ticket to Necrophilia-by-the-Nile is worth every nickel.