Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo
★★★★☆ Beautifully funny
Festival Theatre: Tue 16 – Wed 17 Jun 2026
Review by Hugh Simpson
Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, ‘the world’s foremost gender-skewering, comic ballet company’ return to Edinburgh for two nights at the Festival Theatre. And they bring fun and a high standard of dance.
Since the all-male company was founded in New York in the wake of the Stonewall uprising, perceptions of drag have changed greatly. There is also far more acceptance of more fluid presentations of gender inside the dance world, so the questions must be whether the Trocks’ trademark of male dancers in tutus and pointe shoes can still be funny, and does it still make for high-quality entertainment? On this evidence, the answer to both is a resounding yes.
The Trocks, Dying Swan. Pic: Roberto Ricci.
The Trocks’ ‘50th anniversary tour’ (which has been going on since before their actual 50th anniversary two years ago) features pieces in a variety of balletic styles.
There is, of course, a huge amount of humour in what the Trocks do, but it is combined with genuinely impressive dancing. The parodies of ballet – the over-earnest solos, the OTT costumes, the exaggerated pantomiming of emotions, the stone-faced desire to hold an elegant pose longer than is desirable – are backed up by genuine technique. After all, getting something the correct degree of slightly wrong is as difficult as getting it right.
born of a respect
Moreover, the fun that is poked at romantic and classical traditions is born of a respect and love for them as well as a deep awareness of the things that are really rather silly when you think about them.
The Trocks, Walpurgisnacht. Pic: Jim Coleman
This comes to a head in Go For Barocco, the ensemble piece that is a parody of the choreographic style of George Balanchine. Reducing the fundamentals of dance to its most absurd, it is genuinely extremely funny, and you are starting wondering what the point of all this jumping about really is. The real genius is that it then reinforces exactly what that point is, through how impressive and involving the performance is, and simply how much fun it all is as a spectacle.
The opening Swan Lake once again has an at times amusingly clumpy corps de ballet, a haughty Prince Siegfried (Andrea Fabbri or ‘Araf Legupski’) and an impressive Odette, played by Colette Adae aka Jake Speakman.
constantly-moulting swan
The out-of-breath Rothbart is played by Robert Carter in the guise of Yuri Smirnov. Carter returns in the form of Olga Supphozova at the close of the second act as The Dying Swan. The constantly-moulting swan is the centre of a lovely combination of technique and comedy, made all the more poignant as Carter, a dancer with the Trocks for more than half its existence, is retiring after this tour.
The Trocks, Swan Lake. Pic: Vito Lorusso.
Elsewhere, there’s an elegant pas de deux from Don Quixote by Vavara Laptopova (Takaomi Yoshino) and Jacques d’Aniels (Antonio Lopez). The third act’s Valpurgeyeva Noch, a Bolshoi take-off to Gounod’s Faust, has some exquisite dancing and some top-quality clowning about.
The comedy is often laid on with a trowel, but it’s sometimes more of the blink-and-you’ll miss it variety. Yes, there are dancers speed walking, performing awkward roly-polys, frantically trying to upstage each other, playing to the crowd or missing their mark.
flossing
But the members of the corps de ballet flossing, imitating John Travolta or going full Fosse are all the funnier because they are not the real focus of attention at the time.
The commitment to the comedy is carried through the whole performance, with the pre-show announcements, the curtain calls, and even some of the lighting effects joining in.
Not only is this genuinely funny, as a demonstration of ballet skill it is better than you probably expected. Either way, it’s a great night out.
Running time: Two hours (including two intervals).
Festival Theatre, 13/29 Nicholson Street, EH8 9FT
Tuesday 16 – Wednesday 17 June 2026
Daily at 7.30 pm
Tickets and details: Book here.
The Trocks. Pic: José Luis Marrero Medina
ENDS
