Red Giselle, Sadler's Wells, London

To judge by the vast number of Swan Lakes touted to UK audiences by subsidy-bereft Russian companies, you'd believe Russia was fixated on its imperial, fairytale past. The arrival of the Eifman Ballet Theatre of St Petersburg last week goes some way to correcting that view. Former dissident Boris Eifman's neo-classical take on ballet is unmistakably Russian – big on bravura, big on Russian-historical themes – yet it has flung aside the shackles of the so-called St Petersburg style without apology.

The company has been going since 1977, but in the pre-Gorbachev years it only narrowly survived the authorities' disapproval (Eifman's choreography was "pornographic" they said). These days Eifman is lauded in Russia, has had his ballets danced by the Bolshoi, and his own 60-strong troupe has an annual residency in New York.

Red Giselle (1997), the first of two full-evening ballets shown at Sadler's Wells last week, is expressionist dance drama on a grand scale. Based on the true story of the great ballerina Olga Spessivtzeva (who tragically, like Nijinsky, spent more of her life in an asylum than she ever spent in dance), it attempts to detail not only the personal reasons for her mental decline but also the political upheavals through which she lived.

Which is a pretty tall order, and at first one reels from the manic energy of the staging as it tracks back and forth between intimate close-up and wide-screen vistas. Of the latter we have head-scarved Bolsheviks romping about Les Mis-style, Russian aristos mournfully boarding ships to America, and a wild Paris nightclub a-hop with the Charleston, all in the space of half an hour. The few conventionally balletic set pieces are dispatched early on, showing Olga's rise from mid-rank at the Imperial Ballet to stage icon of revolutionary Petrograd.

From then on Olga's story becomes fragmented, more heavily symbolised and, oddly, easier to follow. The choice she has to make between the demands of her old ballet master and her exciting but abusive KGB lover prompts some inspired duets and trios. The mores of old Russia battle with the new, while the old ballet certainties wrestle with Eifman's own jagged, off-centre idiom which, at its most extreme, makes even the great pas de deux innovations of Kenneth MacMillan look like government advice for safe sex.

The connection with Giselle, Spessivtzeva's most celebrated role, is cleverly exploited to render the end of Olga's story both familiar and heart-wrenchingly raw. When her fragile personality takes yet another knock in Paris (she is stricken to learn that her Albrecht is gay), Eifman shows her disintegration on stage during Giselle's mad scene. This ballet-within-a-ballet notion nicely blurs any remaining convictions we have about what is real or imagined, making the cycle of tragic ironies complete.

I am the first to admit that Red Giselle has some less-than-subtle elements, not least its pick'n'mix treatment of Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, Adolphe Adam and Alfred Schnittke. But the powerful sweep of Eifman's narrative, the angular urgency of his choreography, and the sheer thrust of the company's performance leaves me dizzy with admiration. The mirror-themed designs by Viacheslav Okunev are the most imaginative I've seen in a Russian production. And Vera Arbuzova as the doomed heroine uses her spun-glass physique and refined gift for melodrama to epic effect.

j.gilbert@independent.co.uk