Purposeless silliness: Coppélia at the ROH
Coppélia
Royal Ballet
Royal Opera House
Amphitheatre A33, £19
4 December 2019
ROH page
I guess Coppélia is one of those ballets you have to feel some affection towards if you’re going to have any truck with traditional ballet. It has cute dorky music by Delibes, a story that is almost exclusively an excuse for the ballerina to do many bizarre things, a final act in which nothing but dancing happens and, in The Royal Ballet’s De Valois production, garish technicolour costumes that make me think nostalgically of watching scratchy ballet videos from the floor of my gran’s sitting room.
Coppélia was not in my gran’s collection and this was my first exposure. I was kind of hoping it might yield more from me than this conditional and resentful half-fondness, and if I squint a great deal I can envision the response I expected. It’s based on Hoffmann, for heaven’s sake, and has ballerinas pretending to be robots in time to twee Delibes waltzes. This could be a camp extravaganza, especially under the austere stereotypical British ballet madam of De Valois. But, ultimately, it just isn’t fun enough for that: on this performance, Coppélia is closer to the wearing silliness of Le Corsaire rather than the bizarre absurdity of La Bayadère.
There are two specific structural reasons for this, I think, in addition to the ballet’s general lameness. One is boringly pragmatic. Coppélia is a short ballet. I know its two intervals will be essential for enabling set changes and building bar revenue, but a ratio of interval to ballet of nearly 1:1 is too much interval for me. What a drag.
The second is that there is SO MUCH for the ballerina to do. I, like the rest of the world, am a fan of Francesca Hayward and the beautiful shape of her and the ebullience and grace of her movement – but stamina is not one of the strengths you’d expect her to have given her age. By the third act it looked she had had more than enough, and it’s difficult under those conditions to drum up enthusiasm when the act doesn’t even need to be there and you could have got home half an hour ago. Meanwhile Alexander Campbell has almost nothing to do, spending most of the second act asleep. Perhaps if I’d seen Marianela Nuñez this would have all made sense; but as it was it feels like a structural flaw.
The corps looked sharp, it’s always a pleasure to see Gary Avis, the orchestra sounded fine and I do quite like those ugly designs – but, really, I do wish I’d been able to see a bit more purpose in all this silliness.
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