A few years ago, when the Royal's budget had a more elastic waistband, there was talk of a new production of the comedy classic, Coppélia. In leaner, meaner times the plan's been dropped. In its place the company have revived Ninette de Valois's 1954 staging of the ballet, and Osbert Lancaster's original, delicious designs.
Lancaster's flat, posterpaint sets look almost naive to a modern eye, yet they're animated by such droll and fanciful energy that they seem classic rather than dated. When the curtains open on his whimsical sunlit square, then on the surreal treasure trove of Dr Coppélius's workshop, it's like turning the pages of a precious children's book.
Less successful are the costumes, whose fake folkloric sometimes looks fussy rather than comic. An erratic line between charm and fustiness runs through this very mixed production.
Coppélia is a French ballet with an Imperial Russian past, and it was the latter which de Valois adhered to, making the work look grander and more formal than the more vernacular British productions that followed it. The mime is dominated by classical gesture rather than demotic body language and the choreography is emphatically virtuoso.
In Acts 1 and 2 the mix of French and Russian works engagingly well. The folk dances rattle along with a rhythmic and acrobatic extravagance and I loved the prettily choreographed "dialogue" for Swanilda's friends. When Swanilda is feeling sorry for herself, her friends echo the sighing curve of her phrase; when she challenges them with a tricky step, they respond in a giggling canon.
In Act 3, however, the structure so rigidly follows the old Russian formula (set piece divertissements, grand pas de deux) that we lose all sense of Coppélia as a distinctive world and Franz and Swanilda as distinctive lovers. While more recent stagings keep the action flowing, giving comic moral force to the newly grown up lovers as they're reconciled with Dr Coppélius, de Valois's staging virtually abandons the plot.
When Swanilda (Miyako Yoshida) enters in her ballerina tutu with Franz (Carlos Acosta) in his immaculate jacket, they're like overdressed strangers. With a different cast we may feel otherwise. Yoshida and Acosta are very conventional lovers (flouncy flirt meets oversexed dude), and though the glorious expertise of their dancing conceals their limitations in Acts 1 and 2, there's no emotion in their final pas de deux. However beautifully they dance, we don't warm to them. Worse still, given that this production bars them from repenting of their bad behaviour towards Dr Coppélius we don't, by the end, even like them.
In rep until May 14. Box office: 0171-304 4000
