We've all had our Coppelia moments of fixing our desires on the unattainable and mooning after beauty that has no more to do with life than a display in a glass cabinet. Hoffman's weird tale The Sandman exploits these ideas as well as fantasies about clockwork sex without emotional entanglement. This story, on which Coppelia is based, shows up the nineteenth century's unhealthy preoccupation with automata and its idealization of the female form. Man, according to Hoffman, looks to a doll's unruffled surface; its very lack of life and malleability acts as a powerful aphrodisiac.
      Delibes' Coppelia plays down the horror of the original and instead concentrates on the comedy of Frantz's vanity. Frantz (brilliantly played by Alexei Terentiev)) is enamoured of a living doll. She seems to be reading a book on the balcony of a romantic square in a village unaware of the creeping dangers of mechanization as clouds of smoke belch from the toymaker Dr Coppelius's workshop. Nadezhda Shvets's set beautifully combines Bruges and Bremen, Tudor rustic wood-beams, folkloric and fairy-tale mauves and greens, all dominated by a church tower.
      Frantz neglects his bride-to-be Swanilda (Terentiev's real-life wife, award- winning ballerina Kristina Terentieva) for the promise of some robot fun. Frantz's exuberant leaps are designed to impress Coppelia. Her iciness only make him leap higher as he hopes to be noticed. Swanilda is annoyed at Frantz's partiality for the silent woman on Dr Coppelius's balcony. In turn her solo competes in intensity with Frantz, demonstrating the depths of her feeling through the fluidity and agility, which, in a mechanical age, are tokens of the human.
      Around them both, brightly clad young men in embroidered waistcoats, dressed as if belonging to rival lovers' guilds, and young women in peach costumes, echo the ritual dance of attraction. Saint Leon's choreography incorporates elements from folk dances, revelling in the energy and pageantry of volk culture. Harps and strings evoke the smoothness and romance of a small town idyll. The smallness of the Richmond Stage actually worked to the cast's advantage giving the sense of a whirling peasant fête against a backdrop of smiling children.
     It becomes clear that the spontaneous dancing is not just an outpouring of volk exuberance, the town is celebrating a new bell which reinforces the mechanic/organic dichotomy at the heart of the ballet. The townspeople are more sophisticated automata, not exactly clockwork but with the rhythms of their lives regulated by the tolling of the bell.
      The second act begins when Swanilda leads the other girls connected like a daisy chain into Dr Coppelius's workshop after discovering the toy-maker's key in the square. Coppelius's weird figures - a knight, a fruit-bearing black servant, a wizard with a telescope, a Pierrot and Courtesan - all come to sudden and soulless life. The girls' high jinks are cut short when a furious Coppelius returns striking the ground with his wooden stick.
      Swanilda discovers the truth about Coppelia and hides in her compartment, dressing herself as the doll and leaving the toy ransacked and wigless. What follows is the battle for Frantz's soul, when he turns up through a window to woo the mechanical lady. As Swanilda's mechanical dance gains fluency and life, with Coppelius mistakenly believing he has transferred Frantz's life force into the doll, the whole audience was utterly absorbed. Looking up into the boxes I saw many pairs of round spectacles, reflecting the lights of the toy workshop, all belonging to little girls who undoubtedly wanted to be ballet dancers., while the man with crumpled grey hair swigging whisky from a bottle in the row infront of me was in tears by the end of the second act. The ballet shows us humanity as a wonderful dancing toy, capable of breaking down into graceless little jerks, sometimes spasmodic, but also both fluid and precise. Reciprocal feeling and fluency, it seems, is what we should aim for.
Daniel Jeffreys