Katie Mitchell’s hotly anticipated new show is delightfully beastly and enchantingly beautiful. The director’s work for adults is austere, but for children she paints in every colour: the spangled showmanship, earthy mirth, Puckish attitude and sheer wonder on display in this most feminist of fables would do Angela Carter proud.
In Lucy Kirkwood’s new version, the story of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is narrated by a dapper fairy (Justin Salinger), whose velvet suit is as pink as candy and whose heart is as black as coal – we know because he plucks it, still beating, out of his breast pocket. Beauty is a bold tomboy, who picks fleas from her hairy captor, throws off her skirts to climb trees, and longs to gaze at space, where the fairies come from. The Beast (Mark Arends) rears seven feet high on his hairy stilts, roars discordantly through a scarily effective chest mic and is more werewolf than Gruffalo.
His tragic enchantment is also staged through Matthew Robins’s incomparably eldritch shadow puppets: snipped with gothic delicacy from black paper, their crooked fingers reach directly into your imagination. Superlative elements don’t always come together to make spellbinding theatre. But Mitchell’s show is magic – it wraps you in a fabulous world where your senses seem wonderfully heightened and intensified.
Gareth Fry’s soundscape gurgles like a plughole. And Vicki Mortimer’s set is a box of delights – a marble dining hall with a magic movie screen and a dumb waiter which brings Beauty anything she wishes for. The Man in Pink and his browbeaten helpers (Kate Duchêne brings down the house as glum Gallic chanteuse Cecile) clop mischievously in and out of the scenes.
They pause or fast-forward the human actors, or hook them up to a ‘brain-milking machine’, a marvellous contraption which broadcasts innermost thoughts. With its feet on the ground, its claws in your fantasies and its eyes on the cold, cold stars, this show is a treat which is almost too good for children.