Forget about simpering beauties: Tim Supple and Melly Still’s carnivalesque setting of eight fairy tales may boast an icicle-laden roof that is white as snow, but it is unstintingly red in tooth and claw. I shuddered at the retelling of ‘Bluebeard’, which shows the white-veiled corpses of the French serial killer’s previous brides dangling in metal cages. But my ten-year-old companion was unperturbed: he even chuckled over a cannibalistic meal in ‘The Juniper Tree’, in which a wicked stepmother hacks her small boy to pieces then feeds him to his unsuspecting father (the grisly stuff is done with shadows, which leaves plenty scope for imagination).
Fairy tales are made of powerful stuff and Supple and Still’s selection is based on wonderfully dark and earthy prose versions of the stories by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. The informal ingenuity of Still’s staging – and the cartoonishly expressive talents of the actors, who embody cows and pigs as naturally as woodcutters and fairies, with minimum stage trickery to assist – is ideal for the material.
‘Beasts and Beauties’ is not afraid to be ugly: an attitude that pays rich comic dividends when a pig gobbles cream off her master’s waistcoat, or a preening Emperor struts naked before the paparazzi with nothing but a few strategically placed flags and coffee cups between us and his dangly bits. The homely quality authentically reflects the humble origins of stories that have been retold to generations of children, captivating them with magical solutions to poverty like a goat that shits gold, or a feral beast who is a prince beneath his hairy skin.
The beauty of this ripely funny and subversive staging is that it makes direct imaginative contact with its audience: each of these actors is a storyteller, narrating his or her own role within the tale, and thus giving them irrepressible new life with each telling.