Adapting the ballet Coppélia into a single-act fringe musical demonstrates Plucky Culprit Productions is an ambitious theatre company. The extent of their ambition does not, however, become apparent until halfway through The Girl with the Enamel Eyes. When a character sings "the genre has switched to a darker narration", he is making an understatement.
Mayor Dopplemayr (Hayley Boutty) tries to reverse a population decline in her European village by offering financial incentives to anyone willing to marry and have children. Cynical Swanhilde (co-director Emily Millington) sees the opportunity to make a quick quid, but her lifelong friend Franz (co-director Jake Smeeton) hopes this might finally give him the chance to find true romance.
Having been turned down by every woman in the village, Franz becomes infatuated with Coppélia (author Emmy Khan), whom he glimpses though the window of the laboratory run by the gender-neutral Dr Coppélius (co-lyricist Rum Wanono-Samuel). However, after losing the sole member of their family to survive the plague in a fire (talk about bad luck), the doctor’s sanity is fragile, making them willing to go to extremes to replace a lost child.
The score by Emmy Khan is largely harpsichord / keyboard-based, bringing to mind the sound of a music box, appropriate for a play with a mechanical character. Jake Smeeton does, however, get to deliver a cheeky tribute to Andrew Lloyd Webber / Les Mis with a big, soulful love ballad. There is also, for some reason, a tip of the hat to singer-songwriter Aimee Mann.
Co-directors Emily Millington and Jake Smeeton use the first half of the musical as an exercise in misdirection. The impression is given the musical is a broad, even bawdy comedy. Fulsome praise drives Mayor Dopplemayr towards sexual arousal while her catspaw writhes in submissive pleasure on the floor. Very Trumpian.
Only Emmy Khan (a wonderfully inhuman and genuinely creepy Coppélia) and Rum Wanono-Samuel (a conflicted Dr Coppélius) are allowed to show any nuance in their characters. Other cast members aid the misdirection with performances which move towards caricature—broad and loud.
The approach succeeds in being funny and in deceiving the audience, but potential is wasted due to a failure to link into developments in the second half. Franz is portrayed as a hopeless romantic with the emphasis on ‘hopeless’, rejected by every woman in the village. Had the character been a more traditional romantic ‘hero’, his fate in the second half would have been even more surprising and tragic.
The atmosphere in the second half shifts dramatically towards horror—again, the company’s ambition is apparent as they opt for a disturbing psychological unease rather than an easy, straightforward Gothic tone. Dr Coppélius turns out to be following in the footsteps of Dr Frankenstein and seeking to create life, and poor old Franz may have a part to play in the process. Emmy Khan’s Coppélia is not a clichéd tragic creature but interpreted as a mad-eyed alien / artificial being who does not really understand humanity and so is liable to accidentally cause terrible harm.
Although uneven, The Girl with the Enamel Eyes shows Plucky Culprit Productions to be talented as well as ambitious and to have tremendous potential for the future.