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‘Would you love me more if I was a robot?’: the new ‘Stepford Wives’ Coppélia

Scottish Ballet’s new production of Coppélia - Andy Ross
Scottish Ballet’s new production of Coppélia - Andy Ross

There’s a story. It’s about men and technology and desire. It’s everywhere. One version, told using a bank of phonographs and speaking tubes, is in its last weeks at English National Opera. Another, with screen projections, a 3D printer and a live video camera operated by one of the dancers, is about to appear on the stage of the Edinburgh Festival Theatre.

But you can also see it in most of our civic art collections – in Pre-Raphaelite paint on the wall of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; in cement, sturdily, in Wandsworth Park in London. And depending on the tone you or your partner takes when talking to Alexa or Siri, it might even be happening in your home.

Ovid is the source. From his poem, set down in Latin around 8AD, flows My Fair Lady (ENO’s current concern), Coppélia (Scottish Ballet’s imminent one), Burne-Jones’s The Hand Refrains, Alan Thornhill’s Pygmalion, and a millennium of womb-envious art in which men make women and fall in love with them. Metamorphoses places the original story in Cyprus, where there’s a whole lot of loving and Ovid’s protagonist, Pygmalion, is having none of it. He turns his back on the city and heads for the hills, where he spends his time raging about the kind of women he doesn’t like – the flesh and blood variety – and chiselling out a life-size image of one that he does.

This is Galatea, a work of art brought to life by the divine intercession of Aphrodite, goddess of love. As the statue’s surfaces soften, Pygmalion drops his mallet and his vow of celibacy and becomes one of culture’s most persistent archetypes.

Ovid tells us that ivory was Pygmalion’s medium – which makes you wonder if he knew the correct dimensions of an elephant. His followers have chosen other materials. When E T A Hoffmann retold the story in The Sandman (1816), Galatea’s part was taken by a female automaton built by the weird alchemist and inventor Dr Coppélius, establishing the technological grounds for future versions of the story – the clockwork ballerina in Léo Delibes’s Coppélia (1870); the robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), in her pulsing electrical halo; the Scarlett Johansson-voiced operating system with whom the hero of Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013) attempts romance.

Bethany Kingsley-Garner stars in Scottish Ballet’s Coppélia - Andy Ross
Bethany Kingsley-Garner stars in Scottish Ballet’s Coppélia - Andy Ross

Even George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913) and its Lerner and Loewe musical adaptation My Fair Lady (1956) are a subtle form of science fiction. Eliza Doolittle’s movement across the class barrier of Edwardian England is not achieved solely through her effort and Henry Higgins’s brutal training. She isn’t just “passing”. Her conversion from Cockney flower girl to belle of the embassy ball is as profound and physical a change as Jekyll’s transformation into Hyde. And it’s done with machinery – the Dictaphones into which Eliza pours her vowels; the gas-powered device with a revolving mirror that responds to the hardness of her aitches in that speech about the rarity of hurricanes in Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire. Professor Higgins says that he has invented Eliza. His mother, with cool Freudian hauteur, compares him to a baby playing with a doll.

The latest talents to tackle this story are Morgann Runacre-Temple and Jessica Wright, director-choreographers of a new Coppélia substantially reimagined for Scottish Ballet. Their Dr Coppélius is not a provincial eccentric despised by his neighbours, but the billionaire CEO of a Silicon Valley tech firm. The title character isn’t a clockwork automaton, but an AI entity first seen on a screen, which Coppélius then attempts to print into three dimensions.

The process goes wrong. When she seems to move beyond the screen, in corporeal form, she is in fact the heroine, wily investigative journalist Swanhilde, who has disguised herself as the embodiment of the machine intelligence with which her boyfriend, Franz, has become besotted. (One element of the Coppélia story seems immutable: desire for the avatar is a male folly, rationalist scepticism is female.)

Brigitte Helm in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) - Alamy
Brigitte Helm in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) - Alamy

“The central questions of Coppélia that we keep talking about,” says Wright, bringing the spectre of The Stepford Wives into the conversation, “are: would you love me more if I was a robot? Can we be replaced? Are our relationships in danger of being outsourced to relationships with technology? Franz falls in love with a doll. Anyone can fall in love with an image.”

But there’s a difference, and it’s registered in the changes that Runacre-Temple and Wright have wrought upon the story. At the end of the original Coppélia, the old inventor, his laboratory destroyed, accepts a compensation deal from the villagers and joins a dance in celebration of Hymen. Order has been restored and human biology is now the only reproductive show in town. Pygmalion obeys the same pattern. In the ending preferred by Shaw, Eliza turns her back on Henry Higgins and goes out into the world, abandoning him to his speaking tubes and his unrequited love. (My Fair Lady brings them together, but in the current production at ENO, Amara Okereke walks from the stage and into the auditorium, leaving her mentor marooned in the mechanical space of the stage.)

But these are stories from ages when such clean breaks seemed more possible. The new Coppélias are not found in wood-panelled rooms in Mitteleuropa or on Wimpole Street. The automaton in the Hoffmann tale is a remote figure whom the lovestruck hero views through a window using a telescope. Her successors are in our living rooms and in our pockets. In the Channel Four drama Humans, a father purchases a domestic android and switches her to sexy mode while his family is out, visiting ruin upon his marriage. The Franz figure in Her carries his object of desire in his phone and computer. These fears have come past the front door.

“The end of our version is probably more anxious than the original,” says Morgann Runacre-Temple, “simply because we don’t leave it. We can’t just pay off a doddering old man from the town.” In this one, he owns the town.

Nanette Newman as the compliant android and Patrick O’Neal as her creator in The Stepford Wives (1975) - Shutterstock
Nanette Newman as the compliant android and Patrick O’Neal as her creator in The Stepford Wives (1975) - Shutterstock

Anxiety loves technology. Phantom fears have gathered around everything from the printed book to the nickelodeon to video games. Regency moralists fretted about the effects of the Gothic novel; their descendants worry about the effect of phones on the collective attention span.

But ballet can keep technology in its place. The new Coppélia uses its live video cameras to make the human body itself more visible to its audience. And no robot can dance like Fonteyn or, for that matter, any other members of her remarkable species. “Even the robots that are being made now,” says Wright, “that are apparently extremely sophisticated, are wildly off. The more they try to be human, the harder it seems to be.”

Digital avatars, though, may be another matter. In a purpose-built theatre in London’s Docklands, more persuasive beings are coming to life. ABBA: Voyage is a virtual concert realised by motion capture and projection technologies about which its makers remain understandably discreet. Most attendees find themselves asking whether the figures on stage are perfect lookalikes synchronising their actions to the plausible, but clearly computer-generated Agnetha, Benny, Anni-Frid and Björn on the giant screens – until a spectacular moment that reveals this is quite impossible. Runacre-Temple has seen the show and emerged wondering breathlessly whether they could have access to the same technology. To which, obviously, the answer was no – given that it cost around £175 million to produce.

ABBA: Voyage has its Ovidian side: it gives plausible life to an image; stirs powerful feelings in its audience. But it’s a happier story. One that strengthens human relationships rather than spoiling them. For the band, whose marriages and divorces and reconciliations are part of the narrative; for the audience, too, who, unlike Pygmalion or Franz or Henry Higgins, are experiencing a love that they already occupy; not an illusion they could ruin themselves trying to live inside.


Scottish Ballet’s ‘Coppélia’ is at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh from Aug 14-16. Tickets: 0131 473 2000; eif.co.uk