The company has a hit on their hands: Scottish Ballet’s Coppélia reviewed

With the major companies largely on their summer breaks, the Edinburgh International Festival struggles to programme a high standard of dance (though, having said that, I have memories of being taken in short trousers to the 1967 festival and seeing New York City Ballet during its glorious prime). The dearth tends to be masked by falling back on what used to be called ‘ethnic’ product and that peculiarly French phenomenon, the multimedia event spanning circus, mime, video and spoken text, usually sewn up with some thread of an over-arching theme thrown in.

This year it’s the turn of something called Room, presented by La Compagnie du Hanneton, whose chief cook and bottlewasher is James Thierrée, formerly of the whimsically charming Le Cirque Imaginaire. But Room is not whimsically charming: indeed, it seems to me nothing more than an infuriatingly tedious and pretentious ego trip, extending without interval over two excruciatingly protracted hours.

Thierrée is a clown of sorts, but a philosophical one. Spasmodically gurning and moonwalking, he spouts a rambling macaronic of mad-scientist claptrap vaguely related to the semantics of walls and ceilings, spaces that we inhabit and spaces that contain or imprison us. Around him elements of a room are collapsed and reconfigured, as ten supporting performers sing fragments of popular songs, blow or scrape on musical instruments and prance around like marionettes. It’s Dadaist parody, without shape, style or point; it’s also dismally self-indulgent. Towards the end, Thierrée admits to the audience: ‘I owe you an explanation. But there is no explanation.’ And no excuse either.

For those who fancy something more substantial, Akram Khan arrives in the festival’s final week with his reimagining of The Jungle Book; I was lumbered, however, with the slimmer pickings of ‘Refuge’, a series of short chamber-sized events focused on ‘the movement of people across the globe’. I have no wish to be gratuitously unkind to people who have probably suffered terribly, but alas, Farah Saleh and Oguz Kaplangi’s A Wee Journey, ‘a choreographed musical journey celebrating diversity’, was so vacuous in conception and amateurish in execution that it really had no place at a major festival. Mostly consisting of horizontal contortions of a gymnastic sort that I attempt with my personal trainer, it left many questions unanswered, such as why did they keep hitting each other with black plastic bags?

And so with relief let me turn to Scottish Ballet’s fresh and funky take on Coppélia. With its comic-opera setting, it’s a frolic that in its traditional Saint-Léon form can seem cringe-makingly ickle-girly, despite the effervescence of Delibes’ enchanting score. Yet by adapting the original mechanical-doll scenario to the diabolical ambitions of Silicon Valley, Morgann Runacre-Temple and Jess Wright have made something that carries dramatic weight and conviction.

Dotty Dr Coppelius is transformed into a sinister Steve Jobs figure and frisky Swanhilda and her swain Franz become investigative journalists reporting on the launch of his latest robotic clone, which he considers better than the real thing. Swanhilda’s timely intervention confronts him with the error of his views, his high-tech punishment fits his crime, and good old-fashioned true love triumphs.

Delibes’ music is mashed up and synthesised (in the style of what Akram Khan did with Adolphe Adam’s score for Giselle), a couple of plot-advancing scenes of spoken dialogue are enacted with exaggeratedly expressive gestures (rather in the manner of Crystal Pite), and there’s extensive use of video and CGI enhancing an ingeniously flexible white-walled set designed and lit by Bengt Gomer.

Yes, it’s all super-trendy and devoid of anything like aesthetic complexity or emotional subtlety, but because it’s so slickly packaged and crisply danced by a well-drilled ensemble, with vivid leading performances by Constance Devernay-Laurence (Swanhilda) and Bruno Micchiardi (Coppelius), it succeeds in the theatrical moment. A couple of scenes could have done with a trim – point made, time to move on – but judging by the audience’s gripped attention and ecstatic response, Scottish Ballet has a hit on its hands.