Skip to main content

Royal Ballet: Coppélia review – hello, dolly!

Royal Opera House, London
Francesca Hayward sparkles in this twee revival, a luminous presence in an inconsequential story about a lifesize doll

There are ballets of magical otherworldliness, of stirring drama, technical fireworks or formal daring. And then there’s Coppélia. Originally created in 1870 – this production by Royal Ballet founder Ninette de Valois dates from 1954 – Coppélia is a ballet with the thinnest of plots. Against a picturesque Germanic backdrop, Swanilda’s caddish fiance Franz will flirt with anything, even the mysteriously placid girl sitting in Dr Coppélius’s window … who turns out to be a lifesize doll. What larks!

Spread over three acts, there’s very little to work with. But if anyone could make this twee set-up worth watching it’s Francesca Hayward, a natural actor with luminous presence on stage. As Swanilda, she is spiritedly teenage, jumping down steps, huffing at Alexander Campbell’s Franz and his wandering eye, and conning Coppélius with her own doll-like act. She is full of personality – the very opposite of inanimate doll Coppélia. There should be no contest in Franz’s affections, but this is a story of grass-is-greener idealism, the “perfect” woman versus a feistier reality.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/34AyE9G

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

When Brooklyn was queer: telling the story of the borough's LGBTQ past

In a new book, Hugh Ryan explores the untold history of queer life in Brooklyn from the 1850s forward, revealing some unlikely truths For five years Hugh Ryan has been hunting queer ghosts through the streets of Brooklyn, amid the racks of New York’s public libraries, among its court records and yellow newspaper clippings to build a picture of their lost world. The result is When Brooklyn Was Queer, a funny, tender and disturbing history of LGBTQ life that starts in an era, the 1850s, when those letters meant nothing and ends before the Stonewall riots started the modern era of gay politics. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2H9Zexs
Post a Comment
Read more